Rebirth of the English Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope, 1847-1870 1496833996, 9781496833990

Table of contents :
Cover
Rebirth of the English Comic Strip
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
INTRODUCTION: Predecessors. From Broadsheet to Album and Journal
CHAPTER 1. George Cruikshank: The “New Hogarth”?
CHAPTER 2. The Man in the Moon (1847–1849)
CHAPTER 3. Punch—A History of Cultural Francophilia and Political Francophobia
CHAPTER 4. Doyle’s Barry-Eux (Bayeux) Tapestry
CHAPTER 5. Doyle: The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson (1854)
CHAPTER 6. Francophobia: The Flight of Louis-Philippe in Puppet Show (1848), and Louispetit and His Bird in Diogenes (1855)
CHAPTER 7. John Leech and Mr. Briggs
CHAPTER 8. Thomas Onwhyn: The Browns Visit the Great Exposition of 1851
CHAPTER 9. Tenniel and the Wild Beast Hunt in India (1853); Griset’s and Podger’s Elephants
CHAPTER 10. Charles Keene: Fun with the Volunteers and Travels Abroad
CHAPTER 11. Du Maurier: Darwin and a Taste for Tall
CHAPTER 12. McConnell’s Wilderspin in Town Talk, 1858–1859
CHAPTER 13. Illustrated London News and Other Journals
CHAPTER 14. An Ending and a Beginning: Marie Duval in Judy, 1867–1870, with Percy Cruikshank on the Franco-Prussian War
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Citation preview

Rebirth of the English Comic Strip

Rebirth of the

English Comic Strip A KALEIDOSCOPE

1847–1870

DAV I D K U N Z L E University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi. www.upress.state.ms.us Designed by Peter D. Halverson The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses. Copyright © 2021 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2021 ∞ Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938280 Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-3399-0 Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-3400-3 Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3401-0 PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-3402-7 PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3403-4 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

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edicated to my uncle John George Kunzle (1904–1924), who died so very young, was never spoken of, and collected many things, including a complete set of Punch 1841–1891, and a full-size edition (1822) of The Works of Hogarth reengraved from the original plates. These, when I first discovered them at age seven, codetermined the course of my career, and serve now its culmination. Dedication in the present: to Marjoyrie, my life-present.

CONTENTS Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix introduction: Predecessors. From Broadsheet to Album and Journal . . . . . . . . . . . 3 chaPter 1. George Cruikshank: The “New Hogarth”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 chaPter 2. The Man in the Moon (1847–1849) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 chaPter 3. Punch—A History of Cultural Francophilia and Political Francophobia. . . . 73 chaPter 4. Doyle’s Barry-Eux (Bayeux) Tapestry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 chaPter 5. Doyle: The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson (1854) . . . . . 124 chaPter 6. Francophobia: The Flight of Louis-Philippe in Puppet Show (1848), and

Louispetit and His Bird in Diogenes (1855) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 chaPter 7. John Leech and Mr. Briggs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 chaPter 8. Thomas Onwhyn: The Browns Visit the Great Exposition of 1851. . . . . . . 234 chaPter 9. Tenniel and the Wild Beast Hunt in India (1853); Griset’s and

Podger’s Elephants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 chaPter 10. Charles Keene: Fun with the Volunteers and Travels Abroad . . . . . . . . . 276 chaPter 11. Du Maurier: Darwin and a Taste for Tall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310 chaPter 12. McConnell’s Wilderspin in Town Talk, 1858–1859 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 chaPter 13. Illustrated London News and Other Journals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 chaPter 14. An Ending and a Beginning: Marie Duval in Judy, 1867–1870,

with Percy Cruikshank on the Franco-Prussian War. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 ePilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429 notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432 bibliograPhy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439 index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445

PROLOGUE 1847–1870, New Era, New Market

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o doubt, the quantity of good comic strips in England in the 1847–1870 era will surprise the reader. It certainly surprised me, as did the quality and variety of the strips, and the number of artists involved, some famous for entirely different work. While I do exclude or mention only in passing some obviously inferior or lackluster examples, barring the discovery of magazines that escaped my search, the selection here can claim to be definitive. The dates are purposeful, and mark signposts of a special era, and the shaking of a kaleidoscope hitherto hidden from view. The years 1847–1848 start and startle us with revolution and Chartism, into which a novel kind of comic strip fireworks suddenly erupts, before fizzling out all too soon. The following “age of equipoise,” of relative peace, stability, and prosperity, encouraged the development of a great range of inventions and technological innovations that made magazine production, distribution, and transportation cheaper and faster. The generation following the Years of Revolutions 1848–1849 was an age of dramatic economic expansion that seemed to demand a new cultural artifact. Literacy increased (after 1870 even more so, with the Education Acts), as did leisure time for reading. Our chosen period ending in 1870 also culminates with real-life military fireworks—and fatalities: the Franco-Prussian War, pushing us a little into the following year. By which point the comic strip, now truly caricatural, entered a bizarre new stylistic era marked by the work of that extraordinary female artist, Marie Duval, only just now in the process of discovery and celebration. The brilliant historian Thomas Carlyle tried to denigrate magazine work as “below street sweeping as a trade.”1 This was of course a nonsense matched by the reviewer of Dickens who said, “The serial tale . . . is probably the lower artistic form yet invented.”2 Everyone, the best and the hacks, writers of all stripes depended on magazines, which paid relatively well,

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benefited from the gradual removal of newspaper taxes, and proliferated with great numerical force, while suffering at the lower end a high death rate. The “lesser” magazines we shall encounter—beyond Punch which would live on for well over a century, tailed by its so-called rivals, the relatively enduring Judy and Fun—seldom lasted more than a couple of years. They are now quite forgotten, some physically disintegrating. Competition was fierce; the three-penny Punch outlasted its two-penny rivals which were themselves faced, after the end of our period, with the penny and even half-penny, real comic—which abandoned all pretense at news for graphic frivolities of all kinds aimed at the young and semiliterate, reaching by century’s end mass audiences of millions. The way to these heights and depths of journalism was paved in our era, which foretold how a two-penny weekly selling perhaps tens of thousands of copies thanks largely to the burgeoning railway station kiosks was ousted by the penny (even halfpenny) weekly, which by the multiplying factor of shared copies (fivefold, let us say) might approach a six-figure readership. My big survey of the nineteenth-century European comic strip, published a generation ago, offered a panorama of comic strips and picture stories, in albums and magazines, which were dominated by a small number of prolific French (and francophone Swiss) and German authors. Space restriction inhibited closer look at the English contribution, which examined now in depth turns out to have matured and proliferated, in a relative way, from the moment of “rebirth.” I establish here the sociopolitical history as the chief route to understanding the phenomenon explored in this volume. I have found, remarkably, in the artist biographies or comic strip histories, absolutely no critical notice, or even passing mention, of the comic strips of this era, or of the magazines in which they appeared (the only exception is in a biography of John Leech).

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The riches of Britain’s contribution to the comic strip at this time remained a well-hidden treasure, ignored by the various recent comics histories, in part because they were widely scattered in obscure magazines found (virtually) only in the British Library. The comic strips there and in Punch constituted a genre still in its infancy as a journalistic phenomenon. It is no accident that the six well-known artists represented here for their pictorial narratives (all working for Punch, plus George Cruikshank) depended entirely for their reputation and livelihood on single cartoons that were far more numerous than their comic strips. In spite of their influence once they crossed the channel, in Britain there were no comic strip specialists such as Rodolphe Töpffer, Cham, or Wilhelm Busch. The native adventurers into what was virtually uncharted journalistic territory, the lesser artists working for the lesser magazines, some of whom have not even left us their names, clearly needed to eke out a living with other kinds of illustration for which the demand was constant. These forgotten artists number up to twenty working in about ten of our obscure journals (and two in album form). The premature demise of these journals demonstrably sometimes truncated a promising narrative and what had the beginnings of a real commitment to the new genre. Editors had other views, it seems. From the magazine proprietors’ point of view, the new genre of comic strip launched experimentally on an untested market risked significant extra production expenses: the strips had to be carved into woodblocks from a number of small drawings destined for a space that might have gone to half a page of text combined with a single, one-joke cartoon on the other half of the page. The problem multiplied when the graphic story ran over several pages. Like the big cartoon filling one or two facing pages, each page of multiple drawings had to be divided onto blocks and distributed among several engravers; all blocks were then rejoined in preparation for printing.

Compare the situation in England with the country dominating European post-Napoleonic caricature. In France, the country above all others endowed with an inimitable galaxy of caricaturists, several of them international celebrities familiar to us now as then, there reigned Cham. Although his legacy was inevitably overshadowed by Honoré Daumier, who was indubitably the better artist, Cham was the committed comic strip specialist, even as he actually encompassed most branches of caricature. I cite Cham here (my monograph on him is recently out with the University Press of Mississippi) as the model for the new genre of comic strip, especially in the travel satire, which English humor also favored. With comic strip work running effectively from 1839 to 1862, thus overlapping the time frame chosen here, the immensely productive Cham in many ways monopolized the comic strip in France, as he did topical social commentary generally, with his forty-plus comic graphic narratives all-told and (literally) innumerable single mini-cartoons on topics of the day. Appreciated and occasionally copied as he was in England, at home he played to a secure, omnivorous audience. This the English artists lacked, and it is to their audacious shots into the dark that this book is dedicated. The French preeminence in the production of “bande dessinées” as they call it, is well masked in our current age: 4,318 new albums in 2008 from nearly 160 different publishers. A third Asterix volume of 2005 had a printing of 3,075,000.3

Terminology of the Newborn Format Once upon a time: the comic strip was a poor, unbaptized, and unrecognized stepsister of caricature, which was the poor sister of the graphic arts, which were the poor sisters of the visual (or “fine”) arts. If there was a fairy godmother at the birth of the sleeping beauty, the prince of public acclaim was slow in coming to wake her.

The baptism, or christening—the name-giving— was much postponed. Töpffer had called his “invention” a picture story; the name did not stick. Like some of the artists represented here, the new genre was anonymous. Today we have many, too many appellations: comic strip / picture story / cartoon / graphic novel / comic book / sequential narrative / sequential art. Beginning in the early twentieth century, a new cultural commodity began rapidly advancing over the squares to Ninth Art (as the French have called the bande dessinée or comic strip), passing the eighth square, Alice-like, to be crowned Queen of Wonders, where the phenomenon now reigns over an immeasurable population of readers and products. In this volume we favor the monikers comic strip and picture story, to a degree overlapping terms, merging and bracketed while not properly speaking synonymous. They differ strictly, and physically, in two ways: in the comic strip the scale of the drawings tends to be smaller, filling one or a few pages; in the picture story proper each image is larger, filling a half page or most of a full page, as part of a series of such images. George Cruikshank, John Leech, and Charles Keene give us the latter, harking back inevitably to the really large sequential engravings of the acknowledged first great master, William Hogarth. The comic book (or “comic” tout court) nowadays best describes a collection of comic strips, very much a twentieth-century phenomenon, first showing up in England precociously in the 1870s. The graphic novel, here present in just three English examples, is a longer (usually short, small, novel-length, or novelette) version of a comic strip or picture story. Töpffer’s may be called “graphic novelettes,” though I have preferred to give Cham’s much shorter stories this modest title. The mid-century was also, not coincidentally, the great age of illustration, which flourished in journal and book, much of it humorous, semi-caricatural and in the journals called cartoon. In style, however, the much-celebrated masters of book illustration

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in the 1860s have little in common with the caricatural illustrators. The former tended to scorn the latter, as well as the graphic humor called in that very English neologism, the journal cartoon. The international term caricature was itself problematical and contested. It is safer to call much of the drawing in this book, as in so much illustration to popular fiction, humorous rather than caricatural, the latter term carrying associations of grotesquerie and exaggeration considered more French than English. In Britain, true caricatural exaggerations and distortions begin to show up only at the end of the 1860s. Caricature was associated with personal hostility. Satire there always is, but it tends, with notable exceptions, to the mild, quotidian, and politically neutral. As a branch of illustrated journalism, the essentially narrative comic strip vied with the nonnarrative or single “cartoon,” which started out, in Punch, more or less accidentally as a term for the full-page political graphic, before expanding to mean any kind of humorous drawing as we understand it today. The international term “caricature,” which derived from a private studio game in Italy called “caricatura” (loading), was launched in Britain as a commercial-cum-social venture in the eighteenth century, often as exaggerated portraits. Although Hogarth rejected it as a characterization of his own comic art, “caricature” was warmly embraced by the public in the so-called Great Age of Caricature, circa 1780 to 1820, the age of James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson.  Who were the originators of these new humorous hybrid narratives? The Father of the Comic Strip, as I call the modest schoolmaster Rodolphe Töpffer of Geneva, was creator of the graphic novel (histoires en estampes), running up to ninety pages, each with multiple drawings, a length common today but little known in the nineteenth century. Cham’s maximum template, the twenty-page album, I call a novelette, while the caricatural book-ends of young prodigy Gustave Doré, starting with his forty-

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six-page Labors of Hercules (1847), culminated in a massive volume, truly a graphic novel of over one hundred large pages, which satirized Russia during the Crimean war (1854). In England the comic strip emerged as the primary format run over a single or several pages in successive weekly issues; the picture story, defined as a sequence of larger designs, such as Cruikshank’s The Bottle, was a relative rarity in the journals, and a minority in Punch.

The Hesitant Genre: Autocracy of Texts The English comic strip/picture story, while unexpectedly abundant in this period, never attains the regularity and consistency we find in France and with Cham, with his variegated narrative output, or in Germany with Wilhelm Busch, whose lifetime of highly moralistic, wildly successful graphic and verbal slapstick comedy albums brought him great fame. The five major Punch artists who did the occasional comic strip only committed themselves to the genre sporadically and modestly; their output did not exceed one hundred pages over twenty-two years, a (possibly misleading) average of one page per year each. Why? I believe this is partly because they were conscious of lacking the literary skills of, say Töpffer, or even Cham or, more to the point, of their editors, all literary men. All these models were verbally witty, Töpffer admired for his prose and self-written captions as the perfect French stylist, Cham less polished but fluent and versatile in his comedy, and addicted to puns. In England the journal editors were all literary wits and most of them novelists, essayists, and/or playwrights to boot. Wilhelm Busch known in English translation only from 1868, renowned for his facility as a poet, interspersed, in a kind of duel-duet, with equally comic picture and verse. In England of our period there began, on occasion, that separation of roles between writer and artist that has become the norm. The Punch artists,

hyperaware of their inferiority vis-à-vis their literary, editorially dominant colleagues, often relied on outside help, for ready-made jokes in their cartoons, and sometimes for scenarios in the picture stories. Richard Doyle and Charles Keene are notably pedestrian in their captions, and Keene especially required outside assistance. Du Maurier, by contrast, an accomplished novelist, did not. The success of the collaboration in the journal Man in the Moon between Henry Hine and editor Albert Smith, artist and writer, is exceptional as is the less brilliant coupling of artists Matthew Sears and Watts Phillips (the latter skilled with both pencil and pen) in their journal Diogenes. It is safe to surmise that all comic strip authors also worked elsewhere, for instance, creating single cartoons for their own or other publications as well as for books. This was certainly the case with the well-paid, élite Punch artists, who could actually live off their weekly stipend, or retainer, paid at £10–20 per major drawing. The overweening market for illustrated texts of all kinds, particularly in the competitive field of the humorous novel, kept a large number of draftsmen busy—and burdened with unwelcome feelings of inferiority and subservience. Even the immensely successful George Cruikshank chafed at this. Not a few comic strips are unsigned (or uninitialed), which may indicate that the scenarios and captions came from the outside, or from writers in the same magazine. There is no rule here. Anonymity, strictly observed for all text articles in the magazines we use, considered useful as a potential barrier to litigation or some personal remonstrance, was not imposed on the artists. George Du Maurier, who would become a noted novelist, wrote all his own captions; Charles Keene, for all his known reliance on editors and friends, is surely the author of the travel stories probably based on his own experience; John Leech, we are told, “was no writer,” but created a popular, volubly active character who speaks with his author’s voice.

Comic Strip Content: Membra Disjecta The subject matter of the comic strip seems to come from all over the place—enjoyably. Ideas flowed from the witticisms and funny anecdotes like the liquor at the famously bibulous Punch weekly dinners, and gelled into material for the magazine, notably the big political cartoon. The comic strip tended to avoid outright politics. Occasionally it takes on a political crisis, particularly in France, but seems to rely more on the tall or just amusing stories told verbally, over a dinner perhaps. This conversational oil was virtually a prerequisite of social success in elite cultural quarters. The funny anecdote, passed around like the festive port, found its way into print and picture. When the comic strip dissolves into curious fragments, at the end of the 1860s with Marie Duval and others, what today is normalized, not to say banalized in the ubiquitous “gag strip,” it is as if we are listening in on or overhearing some conversational scrap the context or even the meaning of which is absent or obscure. There was even a (short-lived) periodical that called itself Echoes from the Clubs— promising scandalous gossip. Unlike the literary genres, the genius of the comic strip lay in compression or brevity: it could be read fast, a page in a minute or less, the multipage strip in less time than that separating London railway stations. The stop-and-start rhythm of suburban railway systems found an echo in the all-toobrief rhythm of magazine life, and the characters which entered its pages. Author-publisher Thomas Onwhyn signs off on an eleven-leaf “concertina” album as “Timy Takemin.” The comic strip gave a momentary laugh, a brief chuckle, a dig in the ribs, guffaw maybe, as readily and swiftly as a music hall song, which must be funny and concise. It was punctuation to a flow of consciousness, it prompted conversation and interjection, it filled in odd moments of potentially awkward silence; comic magazines were placed by the hostess on the drawing-room

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table to catch the idle eye of the otherwise unoccupied or lonely guest, fulfilling the very purpose for which they advertised themselves. This was of course the function of the cartoon with a frequently redundant caption that today we find falling flat. Imagine the comic strip as a ribbon of comic accidents, jokes, or witticisms unspooling in arbitrary ways and lengths. The ribbon of fun also liked, cautiously, to prompt expectations, “to be continued” in the phrase that has become a current device to arouse reader expectations for more next week, and (most important), generate fidelity and subscriptions. The now familiar device of a continuing hero or protagonist claims an essential role, showing up precociously in mid-century with Leech’s Briggs rather by accident, in forms both narrative and nonnarrative; lesser adventurers like Spoonbill or Poppleton Weasel may poke forth only to be quickly dropped after two appearances. Richard Doyle’s tourists meander around the Continent onward out to a length quite exceptional (p. 139)—how successfully, in the public eye, is hard to judge. Leech’s Mr Briggs and later, Duval’s Ally Sloper became the only popular continuing characters. Sloper’s antics, like (and unlike) those of a Sherlock Holmes, the first continuing character in prose fiction emerging twenty years later, were capable of satisfying an apparently limitless demand. (I discount the comic strip biographies of Louis-Philippe and Emperor Napoleon III, where recurrence of characters is mandated by their real-life history.) The comic strip pioneered concrete, terse description. There was no room for the cartoon caption’s prolix and (to us) tiresomely explanatory puns and jokes. The comic strip arose at the time when the novel discovered the merits of snappy dialogue— more à la Dumas père than Dickens. Wordiness (logorrhea if you will) is the besetting sin of much of the literature of an age in love with words and long, drawn-out novels with multiple plots; today we find even Dickens promiscuous. The comic strip

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on the other hand needs verbal restraint, as long as the action is not in doubt, if only to avoid clutter within the frame and to avoid typesetting problems. Toward the end of our period, Du Maurier pioneered the wordless or “silent” story, following counterparts in France and Germany. Comic strip concision is the cry of the artist under siege by so much surrounding text. The comic strip was reborn and flourished in England at a time when the novel was still king. Britain’s booming literary culture in the nineteenth century raised the novel to a cultural predominance comparable to that of the theater in Jacobethan times. Du Maurier, himself a novelist in his later years, playfully imagined short comic strips with the hallmarks of a novel, at the very moment when he found a way for it to dispense with words altogether. He did this by adding chapter numbers to his drawings, each with a two-word heading but no caption, and dividing them into a trilogy like the long-fashionable three-decker novel. He subtitled his Giant Guardsman, shorn of all text except for “Chap. 1,” A prose poem without words. As a visual, the comic strip is also theater. The stage drama we now ignore, quâ literary-visual art form, throve at the popular level in Victorian England; its link to the comic strip culture (via the music hall?) would be an exploration worth pursuing. Some authors of comic strips, like Watts Phillips, were active writing plays as well as novels, although it was for the latter that the comic strip would claim elective affinity. Cruikshank’s dramatic and socially urgent The Bottle, exceptionally, was turned into many plays simultaneously. The comic strip twice morphed into a real novel: in Cuthbert Bede’s Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (pp. 375–76), which he abandoned as a comic strip in the prestigious Illustrated London News, for the more lucrative form of a novel under the same title. William McConnell’s twenty-three pages of drawings for Mr Wilderspin (pp. 346–69) were quickly expanded in toto into novel-length prose fiction by his scenarist Andrew

Halliday. The process can be observed organically in the Penny Punch, a very short-lived (1849) and impudent “son” of Punch, in The Peregrinations of Simon Slow, which started as a poorly drawn attempt at continuous narrative over half-page designs, with a random-looking choice of incidents. By the seventh installment it was acquiring more text than illustration, until it descended palpably into the current staple of illustrated serial novel.

Time On the continent at this time the same comic character returns regularly for weeks, even months (in Switzerland, France, and Germany), and in England at the start of the Rebirth in a few successive issues, in Man in the Moon and in Punch with Doyle, Leech, and Keene. McConnell in Town Talk keeps one character going for several months, and Doyle commits to the one non-journal graphic novel of our period, until Ally Sloper, capriciously as becomes a superstar stand-up comic, arrives on stage, to last, by popular demand, for decades. Readers of fiction expected and indeed relished such a pattern: for the single novel “to be continued” in regular installments in a journal over a year or two was a commercial commonplace, but the reappearance of a major character in successive novels, as we see, exceptionally, in Trollope, was rare. As a kind of infant progeny of the novel, on the one hand, and cartoon illustration on the other, the comic strip had to negotiate a new graphic dimension: time. The eventual commercial, gravitational pull on the comic strip to imitate the chronological rhythms of prose fiction does not mean that the earlier picture story is lacking in chronological peculiarities. Hogarth’s inimitable repertoire of one or two salient characters are deployed across a series of from six to twelve large plates, in rational time intervals. A century later his admirer Rodolphe Töpffer, in albums with literally hundreds of moments and

separate drawings, disbands all notion of realistic chronology—this proved inimitable, a stroke of peculiar genius. Paradoxically, Töpffer’s own rebirthing of the comic strip in the 1830s and ’40s on the continent, from a town famous for its watches, falls into an era of sociopolitical time control, of a burgeoning factory system, of discipline by the clock. Our starting point in the Man in the Moon 1847 has moments of Töpfferian timelessness; escape into dream time. Subsequently the more realistic comic strip has to alternate or do battle with chronological as well as formal grids (see for instance p. 379 and p. 382). This program of Select Dramatis Personae, to precede our play, illustrates the context and competition from other media: George Cruikshank, failing in his ambition to write his own story in words, achieved in The Bottle and its sequel dramatic scenarios ready-made for translation to the stage. Albert Smith, comic strip scenarist and editor of The Man in the Moon, left to resume novel-writing, and mount his immensely successful and lucrative entertainment about his Ascent of Mont Blanc. Richard Doyle parlayed the social panorama of his nonsequential Manners and Customs of the Englyshe in Punch, into true comic strip episodes, which after being truncated by his quarrel with the magazine, he enlarged into a long and wordy graphic novel. John Leech, perhaps prompted by Doyle, found a way to develop into short narratives his staple of domestic and hunting cartoons. John Tenniel interrupted his big weekly political cut in Punch, to make—just once—comic strip fun with a hapless big game hunter in India. George Du Maurier, early in his long career as a specialist in drawing-room comedy, made short sub-Darwinist narrative detours. He later became a well-known novelist.

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Watts Phillips with talents divided between caricature and the theater, made one extensive and risky foray into a satirical comic strip biography of Louis Napoleon. William McConnell’s twenty-three pages of designs, akin to a short graphic novel, were taken over by his scenarist Andrew Halliday and extended into a novel. Marie Duval: In her youth a successful actress, she took over a character, Ally Sloper, first invented by her polymorphous writer-partner/husband. Soon she made Ally her own, in comic strips gathered from a journal into what is regarded as the first comic book, which led to his being thoroughly merchandized and thus the prototype for numerous subsequent comic strip heroes.

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Rebirth of the English Comic Strip

Introduction

PREDECESSORS. FROM BROADSHEET TO ALBUM AND JOURNAL

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rom the heyday of William Hogarth in mid-eighteenth century until the Rebirth of the Comic Strip, nearly a century elapsed; and a generation separated the Rebirth from the preceding Great Age of Caricature. By the time of the Rebirth, printing and publishing industries, cultural attitudes (such as the “Victorian” rejection of Regency libertinism), and caricature itself had undergone sea changes, to which the career of George Cruikshank testifies. To understand the suddenness and significance of this transformative era, we need to look back briefly at certain predecessors from the Great Age of Caricature and the caricatural hiatus immediately preceding the Rebirth. Hogarth continues as reference point, casting a very long shadow, a paradoxical inspiration to his so-different disciple Rodolphe Töpffer, a Swiss artist publishing in the 1830s out of Geneva and Paris. Töpffer’s genius was to cast off, or at least pare down to essentials, the magisterial storytelling technique of the master, reducing his pungent satirical dramas to “trivial” seeming albums little in size but not in length. The best testimony for attention to Töpffer in mid-Victorian England occurs in the writings of the best-known art critic of the era, John Ruskin, who mentions the Swiss several times. Ruskin was enamored of Töpffer very early, during his student days in Oxford, in 1840 before the English versions were published, so he must have known and probably owned one or more original edition(s). In order to decorate his rooms at the university, he singled out works by two artists, an engraved landscape by Turner and a drawing (unidentified) by the Swiss, as if it were in some

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way of equal interest to the Turner. Much later, he elaborated the “unrivalled” merits of Töpffer, who he says had left behind no worthy successor, in a lecture on The Art of England given in 1883, as a unique master of expressive abbreviation. This was demonstrated in his Histoire d’Albert (1845). Ruskin goes on to praise the artist’s skill as a writer of humorous travel tales such as the Voyages en Zigzag, which were much admired in England and cited by Ruskin elsewhere.1 Another cultural heavyweight, the novelist George Eliot, who was in Geneva for several months 1849–1850, probably picked up Töpffer albums at that time, which she remembered on seeing her life-partner George Henry Lewes losing his hat in the wind, and pursuing it with “squared legs and arms, making a perfect Töpffer sketch of himself.” Ruskin and Eliot testify to a knowledge of Töpffer, which may have been widespread in elite cultural circles in England. There was no attempt, as far as I know, to imitate the Swiss in an original English publication, apart from the fourteen pages of pencil sketches drawn in 1848 by John Lewis Roget, coeditor of the famous Thesaurus, a water-colorist and grandson of a Swiss clergyman. “A sketch in the Life of Mr Pipp the Barber . . .” is entirely in the Töpfferian comic album format, and attempts a narrative which the author evidently cut short and abandoned.2 But long before Töpffer, England’s Great Age of Caricature had turned the emerging comic strip into a minor caricatural genre that shrunk the large-scale Hogarthian multiplate engraved sequences into one or two broadsheets, and the satirical bite and breadth accordingly. The age of Töpffer, who died in 1846, and the early years of his French disciple Cham, already a recognized master by this time, spawned in 1844 a comic album by George Cruikshank, primary heir to the Great Age. As we shall see, his misbegotten Bachelor’s Own Book was perched formally, awkwardly between the grand Hogarthian model and

4  introduction

the Töpfferian comic strip album. Meanwhile, beginning in 1828, caricature had entered a pathbreaking new vehicle: the popular journal. This scattered to the winds of a wide audience a confetti of fun, jokes, and silliness galore, by the hand of new young artists, led by the ever-fertile veteran Cruikshank. It was he who found, also in 1847, as we shall see, the moment, the right theme (a burning social issue), and the right sub-Hogarthian format (medium-sized engravings with descriptive settings). And it was, I believe, the fortuitous presence of Cham in London who spurred a new magazine, in 1847, to venture comic strips in a new medium, multiple installments of large fold-out plates.

Reductions of Hogarth If Rodolphe Töpffer may be called the father of the modern picture story, William Hogarth is the uncontested grandfather. Between the work of these two pioneers, there lies a considerable body of curious although much less striking pictorial narratives, some more serious than comic: toward the end of the eighteenth century the sentimental-moralistic painted series by John Hamilton Mortimer, George Morland, and James Northcote descend into a more didactic age directly from Hogarthian example, yet without achieving anything like his popularity. In Germany meanwhile Daniel Chodowiecki, the most Hogarthian of the age anywhere, miniaturized for almanac illustration the English artist’s “progresses” of virtue and vice. The Great Age of Caricature (c. 1780–1820s), that of celebrated figures such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and young George Cruikshank, joined by lesser but talented professionals and amateurs such as Henry Bunbury and particularly the very young Richard Newton, reverted frequently to the so-called Hogarthian “progress,” adopting his titles and concept but not his substance. These were modest tales, in abbreviated comic strip format, with a consecrated ex-

pectation of tragic-comic narrative “progress” (or progression) recounting the rise, decline, and fall of some conspicuous political individual or social type. The expectation was no longer a Hogarthian “life story” told in six to twelve large plates, and detailing in a close, rich narrative the moral arc or cruces of an individual tragic fate. By the late eighteenth century the master’s concept, simple warnings against personal ambition and temptations (romantic individualism if you will), was reduced to one or at most two single plates, as in the best known of these reincarnated, caricatural progresses, Gillray’s antimilitarist John Bull’s Progress (1793), with its four scenes or his Life of Bonaparte (1800) in eight small panels, both on one sheet with necessarily limited settings. In chapter 12 of my 1973 volume, The Early Comic Strip, I reproduced and commented on about thirty of these “progresses” by about twenty different artists (and there are more), in prints sporting this or a comparable term in the title and in styles varying between truly caricatural and realistic. Editors and artists must have felt that the topics were often too important to be treated frivolously (hence the realism), while a new cultural emphasis on individual responsibility could be asserted by dispensing with setting altogether, leaving only a semaphore of sharply outlined figures adopting expressive, theatrical attitudes. Meanwhile, attempts to imitate the large, multiplate Hogarthian prototype are few: The Stroller’s Progress (1809), by (probably) father Isaac and son George Cruikshank, in six largish plates satirizing the career of actor “Black Jack” Kemble; and The Progress of a Midshipman (1820), in eight plates drawn by young George telling a typical story of suffering, heroism in battle, and eventual promotion, conceived by writer of popular maritime tales Frederick Marryatt. Even this limited manner of pictorial narration was moribund by the time of Töpffer, his seven stories (one remained unpublished), in small but much

plagiarized (or copied) albums, substantial enough to justify the author’s naming and creating a new category for them as “graphic novels.” From 1839 on, these were successfully imitated by his French disciple and admirer Cham, who retained not only the Swiss master’s simplified outline and limited settings, but also much of his comic verve. We shall frequently advert to the probable acquaintance of English caricaturists with the distinctive Töpfferian model, available locally in both original and plagiarized versions; in the case of Cruikshank and Albert Smith (with H. G. Hine), their familiarity with Töpffer is certain. Unpublished hand-drawn copies and translations of both Töpffer and Cham albums seem to exist, but the market for such was limited in Britain. It may be that the surreal plotting of Töpffer’s comic visions was somehow felt to be un-English. It is certain however that original Cham albums (surely along with Töpffer’s) were available in London from Delaporte’s Parisian Repository, 37 Burlington Arcade, which put its sticker on a Cham volume of M. Jobard reproduced in my Cham (p. 198). But the example of Töpffer, known internationally for both his full-length novels and his comic albums, proved above all what the publishing industry failed to recognize: that comic narrative could dispense with the support of the dominant fictional texts. By the late 1840s, the initiation of our Rebirth period, the forms that emerged and sometimes flourished were: the shorter comic strip or picture story running to one or a few, occasionally more pages (and installments) in a magazine, a few stories published in small, cheap albums, and (once only) a single story, a graphic novel. This is a seventy-nine-page album by Richard Doyle, while William McConnell’s Wilderspin runs over twenty-three weekly journal pages. Both are more humorous than caricatural or satirical. Fitting uncomfortably between categories there protrudes, aggressively, Cruikshank’s most consciously “Hogarthian” and seriously tragic production of The Bottle and its sequel (1847–1848).

introduction  5

Incomparable Hogarth was not for every family. His genius reverberated into the Victorian age even when his works were considered by prevalent prim and proper Pecksniffian taste as risqué, scabrous, indecent. The three political parodies after Hogarth included here (Figs. 3-11 to 3-13) remind us that he was, in his way, as familiar a touchstone, as iconic a reference point as Dickens or Shakespeare. The overt sexuality in Hogarth was necessarily neutralized by the serious political purpose of the parodies. Hogarth was safer at any rate than the biblical parodies that ruined the finances and health of Cruikshank’s friend and publisher William Hone, who suffered three exhausting trials for blasphemy in 1818.

Hogarth and the New Realism in Painting Mid-Victorian England coincided with a revival of domestic realism in painting and literature, both showing discernible overlap with the humorous realism of the cartoon and comic strip. In 1836 a review of Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth noted that these essays were not known in England as they should be, nor was the great painter imitated as a moral storyteller. Few English painters hoping to grace the walls of the Royal Academy exhibitions could risk anything approaching the Hogarthian sexual innuendo. The sexually explicit Hogarth compositions like his Before and After required the prints to be hidden away inside of portfolios, lest they fall under the eyes of susceptible females. The Victorian attraction to the popular anecdotal painting certainly harked back to Hogarth, but the only truly literary Hogarthian figure was and remained Charles Dickens, into whose body, in a well-known phrase, “the soul of Hogarth had migrated.” In art, humor was hard to articulate outside the journal cartoon. Henry Heath’s Industry and Idleness Contrasted (twelve plates, 1851) is totally humorless, and riddled with the clichés of family values. The

6  introduction

politicized parodies of single compositions from Hogarth stories that we reproduce here passed muster, but there was no complete parody of a Hogarth sequence until 1884, with the colored lithographs of the Rake’s Progress by Tom Merry, politicized to cast Prime Minister William Gladstone—so paradoxically—as the Rake. The only painted quasi-Hogarthian sequence I have found from the mid-Victorian era is Augustus Egg’s Past and Present (1858, in three parts, not engraved), a tragic parable on the perils of marital infidelity. The better-known William Powell Frith, whom we will meet as a friend and biographer of caricaturist John Leech, painted several hyper-realistic, amusing social panoramas (Ramsgate Sands, 1854; Derby Day, 1858; The Railway Station, 1862) with immense public success. But it was not until 1878 that Frith attempted a whole story, in full, explicit consciousness of Hogarth, in five parts, called The Road to Ruin. This was also mobbed by the public when exhibited at the Royal Academy. Frith’s sequel, the following year, was parodied in comic strip form by James Sullivan in Fun, ending on a real-life “correction,” accepted by Frith himself as the more realistic finale, with the swindler going unpunished instead of his going to jail, and his poor clerical victim reduced to dire poverty.3 The Great Age of Caricature peters out in the tepid political portraits by John Doyle, father of the much more imaginative son Richard, here a major, early exponent of the comic strip. Hogarth and caricature, meanwhile, had not quite died: The sea change of the next generation, the penetration of caricatural illustration into popular journalism materialized as early as 1828, when the journal Bell’s Life in London ran very crude, miniaturized (two by three inch!) versions of Hogarth’s Harlot Progress. Thus Hogarth is not only the distant ember igniting the whole subsequent history of comic strip, where the 1847 Rebirth began in fireworks, but can claim to have furnished, in a manner he cannot have welcomed, Europe’s first journal comic strip.4

Regular weekly cuts in Bell’s Life were gathered together into biannual “recapitulations” called the Gallery of Comicalities, separate four-page broadsheets sold at three pence each, with the little woodcuts often grouped in thematic series. By January 1833, these broadsheets attained a circulation of one and a half million. Like the single sheets from the Great Age, the collections were promoted as suitable for dismemberment into scrapbooks, screens, decoration of coffee houses, and for export. Along with Cruikshank’s seemingly limitless broadening of the reach of social caricature, this may be seen as a gestation period for the mid-century rebirth of the comic strip and picture story.

Seymour: Abbreviated Interregnum Bell’s cuts are by (or purloined from) the best caricaturists of the day, including Robert Cruikshank and his brother George, Kenny Meadows, Robert Seymour, and the very young, then unknown John Leech. In 1829 and 1830 Seymour attempted multiscene, multiplate narratives perched exactly between the old and the new formats. The story of Peter Pickle spans six etched plates, each with some eight variously sized designs, with enough Pickwickian content to prompt the artist to claim title to originating the famous early Dickens creation of 1836. (Seymour would be followed, even more notoriously, by George Cruikshank, who made a similar claim.) Each of Seymour’s plates in largely disconnected episodes of a typical young man’s life puts Pickle through disjunct but predictable exploits. The stereotypical Regency era vices of the first plate are set off against the regenerative illusion of “Rural Retirement” (Fig. I-1),5 in a nature that turns out to be hostile in every way, while life inside the rented farmhouse is simply boring. Note that the screen depicted top right is covered in a potpourri of caricatures—a common usage since the Great Age, and as advertised in Bell’s.

This random scattering or “wall-papering” of funny drawings requires some comment. In France, by mid-century, the prominent publisher Charles Philipon was producing, on a minor industrial scale, comic drawings in large rolls usable as wallpaper to decorate small, private rooms, including toilets. Even if the “wall-papering” of comic pictures relied (in Britain) on cut-outs from various sources, this custom pushed caricature in the direction it was taking in newspapers such as Bell’s and albums such as Cruikshank’s Scraps and Sketches (1828–1832): as decoration of the home, conversation pieces, and innocent relaxation of the family mind-body. “Cruikshankiana” was a name given to miscellanies of graphic jokes, illustrated puns, mini-cartoons, sometimes grouped in thematic series as in Phrenological Illustrations (1826) or Illustrations of Time (1827). Seymour’s semi-narrative story of Peter Pickle (1829; our Fig. I-1 is pl. 2 of six) is not far from this, and reflects the mode (less narrative and more miscellany-like) of other humorous compilations. In its very lack of order or sequence, this mode may be viewed as resistant to the development of true graphic narrative. However, at the same time, it is clear that it expanded the comic vision to embrace a repertory of commonplace incidents and accidents which would eventually, from 1847 on, acquire narrative coherence. Dickens himself would learn this, passing from the episodic comedy of Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers to the dramatic narrative coherence of Oliver Twist. The next two plates of Seymour’s Pickle story titled “Travelling,” with its discomforts and dangers, foreshadow the connected chronological components of the real picture story in Töpffer and especially his disciple Cham. It is curious that Seymour, even before the French satirical journal Le Charivari becomes a model, sends his hero to France, in encounters spiced with fairly correct French dialogue, French customs (in two senses), and French Anglophobia: Pickle is suspected of spying, as was Hogarth in real life, and as would be other comic

introduction  7

Fig. i-1. robert Seymour, “rural retirement.” Mcclean, July 1, 1829. British Museum, Print room, Satires 15984.

strip artist-travelers in the present survey. The final plate promises more sequential narrative, but not the happy ending de rigueur in the future, for the impoverished Pickle finds himself in the ultimate pickle when he discovers his supposedly rich widowed bride is as poor as he, with a brood of ugly children to boot. Seymour followed this up in 1830 with The Heiress, featuring the same principal figure in a similar series grouping multiple scenes on each of six plates, the narrative exploring fashionable female amusements and an elopement. Seymour’s little-known, broad, and physically evocative social panorama warrants complete reproduction and analysis somewhere. The lavish captions we see in Peter Pickle, much of them dialogue, look back to the Great Age and the miracles of minute lettering etched in reverse, and forward to a future wherein balloons inflated by speech text

8  introduction

became the norm. Seymour, in his day considered a rival to Cruikshank, deserves to be remembered for more than his illustrations to Pickwick, his prePunch satirical Figaro in London (1831–1838), or his tragic suicide at the age of thirty-eight.

Chapter 1

GEORGE CRUIKSHANK The “New Hogarth”?

N

o artist was more conscious of the Hogarthian model than George Cruikshank. In the new climate for caricature of the young Victorian age, no one wanted a new James Gillray, whose work desk Cruikshank inherited; and no one wanted his bitter, scurrilous, and contentious satirical mode, into which Cruikshank was initiated as a boy, and which he would later transform into a milder, more innocent form of social comedy. William Hogarth’s brand of satire was different—more openly licentious, but less topically polemical. It was also at its very best, narrative, or better perhaps, dramatic like a play in several acts (as he put it). As grandfather of the modern moral picture story, Hogarth presented a model difficult for a later generation to emulate; he succeeded, just once. Cruikshank started, under his father’s tutelage, as a jack-of-all-trades. We have noted his early Progresses, dictated to him by others, in large format separate plates, under the commonplace Hogarthian title. Young George was soon to express his true genius for broad social comedy in a different format, in scatterings of small, nonnarrative vignette sequences grouped on single or double sheets. These were a novelty, popular and lucrative, typical of the second quarter of the century, when a new mood in caricature beckoned, proving that the new modes of miscellaneous comic album and almanack, as opposed to the single broadsheet of the Great Age, were more congenial—both to the new market and the ascendant artist. Illustration of the new fashionable novels, on the other hand, was another burgeoning market for which Cruikshank was much in demand, promising connections to serious and exciting fiction. These sparked his ambition to create his own stories, which had long lurked in his imagination.

9

Fig. 1-1. george and robert cruikshank. “tom and Jerry Masquerading it among the codgers in the Back Slums in the holy land,” illustration to Pierce egan, Tom and Jerry, or Life in London, 1821.

Tom and Jerry, or Life in London: A Graphic Novel Manqué? An extensive independent narrative opportunity appeared on Cruikshank’s horizon as early as 1820, when he was twenty-eight. At this time, following a year of political turmoil, intensive polemical pamphleteering, and the Peterloo Massacre, Cruikshank turned to social caricature, a sea change in his career. His collaboration with older brother Robert and the popular sports writer Pierce Egan resulted in the extraordinarily successful Tom and Jerry, or Life in London. The thirty-six illustrations were of typical urban amusements with emphasis on their lowlife aspects (Fig. 1-1). This work was widely plagiarized, imitated, staged in several theaters, merchandized, novelized, translated, and “extended in at least sixty-five other publications.”1 An authorship dispute arose, the first of several to haunt poor George: Who developed the

10  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

idea? The themes were autobiographical, depicting in many aspects the rambunctious life of young Cruikshank and friends at the time. George later claimed that his and Robert’s seminal illustrations were the dominant factor, “written up to” by Egan, whose prolix text (three hundred pages) came as an unpleasant, distressing surprise to the brother artists who thought they had originated Life in London. Shortly before his death, George told nephew Percy, “When your father proposed Tom and Jerry to me, I suggested that it should be carried out in a series of oil paintings, after the manner of Hogarth.” But Robert thought etching was a safer bet, money-wise.2 George wanted the book to end on a Hogarthian kind of death as the reward of vice, which Egan vetoed in favor of a wedding. Hailed from the start (1821) as “one of the most amusing books ever published,”3 it enabled Egan to launch a raffish Sunday newspaper he called Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide, which in

1827 became the very first illustrated newspaper, filled with miscellanies of cuts (more or less purloined) by Cruikshank and others. Renamed Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, the paper flourished, attaining a huge circulation with its compilation of tiny social vignettes called Gallery of Comicalities. The June 22, 1828, edition included a “Gambler’s Progress” and tiny copies of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, a subject that the new illustrated Penny Magazine found (explicitly) too indecent to describe or reproduce in any form.4 In the wake of its July 1830 revolution, France, always the beacon in popular art, ushered in a new, concomitant epoch in illustrated journalism: Charles Philipon’s La Caricature, with its full-page cartoon inserted into the newspaper. Added to Cruikshank’s production, and the new English illustrated journals of the 1830s and ’40s, La Caricature, followed by Le Charivari, established the panoramic vocabulary on which the picture story of the future was to draw, with Cruikshank a sporadic participant.

Lambkin: Inspiration from Hogarth and Töpffer? The call to become a “new and epic Hogarth” was ever upon Cruikshank. In 1838 Cruikshank was tempted by a proposal to illustrate, together with young John Leech, a modern Rake’s Progress, which with its whiff of Oliver Twist came to nothing. Collaborating with (illustrating) the overbearing novelists Dickens and Ainsworth proved a humiliating experience for Cruikshank, who sought, above all, independence from the writing crowd. In the 1830s there arose from afar a new and very different model of artistic independence in the Genevan Rodolphe Töpffer. Here was an ideal figure who successfully integrated the roles of artist and writer in one persona. The intermediary was probably Thackeray, an art student in Paris 1833–1834, who returned from France an enthusiast for French

caricature, on which he published in 1839 an influential essay.5 Always close to Cruikshank, Thackeray also shared memories of his visit to Goethe at the time (1830–1831) when the great poet was chuckling over early drafts of Töpffer’s Histoires en Images. Thackeray made his own desultory early efforts at comic strip narrative, which were far too gruesome for public consumption and published only after his death. Instead he would himself illustrate four of his novels. Töpffer had meanwhile drawn and written several picture stories, published in the very period when the French (from 1835) were driven by the censorship to shift from political to social comedy; this also suited the caricatural tastes of the English, already admirers of Charivari stars Honoré Daumier, J. J. Grandville, and Paul Gavarni, and soon to get a taste for Töpffer and his disciple Cham. Töpffer was a special surprise. Cruikshank’s publishers Charles Tilt and David Bogue, alerted by Thackeray and the artist himself, had produced an English-language, glyphographic knockoff of a French plagiary of Töpffer’s Monsieur Vieuxbois (1837) under the title The Adventures of Mr Obadiah Oldbuck (1842). Adorned with a new frontispiece by George and/or Robert Cruikshank, the whole illtraced by the latter, it received positive reviews, and sold better than a competing Cruikshank work.6 Tilt and Bogue also did an English edition of Töpffer’s first graphic novel, Monsieur Jabot (1835), under the title The Comical Adventures of Beau Ogleby (1842). This offered the more conventional satiric butt of the low-class social climber, whom Cruikshank dubbed Lambkin. Under the excessive title The Bachelor’s Own Book, Being the Progress of Mr Lambkin, (Gent.) in the Pursuit of Pleasure and Amusement. Also in Search of Health and Happiness, “Designed, etched and published [i.e., financed] by George Cruikshank” (1844), the story unfolds in a very conventional sequence of various Tom and Jerry– style raffish activities, in twenty-four plates, each

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  11

Fig. 1-2. george cruikshank, three scenes of courtship and final wedding feast, from The Bachelor’s Own Book, Bogue, 1844.

attempting a sub-Hogarthian richness of décor. Arranged two drawings to an oblong page, as in Töpffer’s albums, Cruikshank’s picture story omitted all hint of Hogarthian sex, and makes no attempt to emulate Töpffer’s quivering linear magic, let alone the absurdist, surreal nuptial finale concocted by the Swiss. Lambkin’s stereotypical scenes of courtship

12  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

like much else show no imagination (Fig. 1-2). The banal story unfolds in long tedious captions, the project was never reviewed, and it proved commercially a “positive flop.” Here, indeed, was proof that Cruikshank was no writer: The author’s later claim to have conceived A Life of a Thief, for which some drawings but no letterpress for a story as such have

been found, became the basis of his ill-fated and ill-judged campaign to take credit for the story of Oliver Twist.7

The Bottle: Breaking through Back to Hogarth Cruikshank’s career in the 1840s, erratic, unstable, and financially problematic amid much interesting work, took him from “pre-eminence to mere eminence.” He started short-lived magazines intended as an escape route from the thralldom of the publishers and writers. In the late ’40s, however, he discovered a new, unwonted passion, indeed mission: he fell into the burgeoning Temperance and Teetotal movements. Here at last was a new kind of material encompassing a well-established, morally committed clientele, indeed a whole thriving social movement, which would sustain him to the end of his life. Large, well-organized and financed Temperance movements combatted the alcoholism prevalent among all social classes, especially the poor and lower down. Cruikshank joined the extreme, controversially dominant wing demanding total abstinence or teetotalism. This wing was judged too radical by many cultural leaders and alienated many of George’s friends, notably Dickens. (In The Pickwick Papers [1837, ch. xxxiii], Dickens had roundly ridiculed the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association, dominated by the clerical hypocrite Mr Stiggins.) The leadership of the Temperance movement was a broad coalition of Evangelicals, Freethinkers, Quakers, dissenters generally, mostly middle class, some wealthy and commercially successful. This subculture helped disseminate the artist’s visual propaganda. Prints denouncing drunkenness were not new; Hogarth was remembered for this, notably in Beer Street and Gin Lane, and Seymour tried his hand at it. Cruikshank’s The Bottle (finished by July 1847), its eight plates printed by the experimental and

cheap glyphography (electroplate) process, appeared in several differently priced editions. Sales were reported to be tremendous: “More than 100,000 copies were sold in a few days, it was said [surely an exaggeration—and the prints were] exported in shoals as far afield as America and Australia.”8 “Bottle-mania,” as the furore was called, signaled a great commercial success. On a personal level, it converted if it did not actually enrich the artist himself. The project, as propaganda for a controversial cause, must have surprised many friends. “Good old George” was known to be the most convivial of animals, a doughty trencherman who had on occasion to be accompanied home after a party. George had every personal reason to fear addiction: There were many examples of alcoholism in the Cruikshank family (notably, his father, Isaac) and among the best artists of recent memory, including Gillray, Rowlandson, and George Morland. George Cruikshank’s decision to go dry was surely reinforced by his wife’s illness and death in 1849. Punch twitted the artist for his Temperance zeal,9 while judging The Bottle more effective than any number of pledges or Temperance meetings. This topic of immense, burning weight offered the artist, at last, the “epic or historical,” truly tragic story which he had been encouraged to take up by a sympathetic critic.10 There was publicity in abundance, with plagiaries and pilferage galore, eight simultaneous stage versions and media spin-offs of various kinds. The whole sequence of plates was even copied in a popular German magazine. The Bottle was a successful bid for attention, which had been waning. Cruikshank’s later “monster” paintings, The Worship of Bacchus on a related theme (1863) and The British Beehive (1867), should have ridden the wave, but suffered relative neglect even when exhibited round the country. The author’s hope to recoup losses occasioned by so many donations to the teetotallers movement, including copies of the engravings themselves, given out freely as prizes, was dashed.

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  13

The Bottle, moreover, proved to suffer from an ideological and perhaps “demographic” problem, the depth of which is hard to evaluate. Although alcohol abuse was deemed a typically lower-class vice, and thus easy for the middle classes to reprobate, it is likely few copies of the prints reached, much less were bought by the most vulnerable classes whose principal vice it was meant to cure. The accusation of “coarseness and vulgarity” against The Bottle, as too “sensationalist” and “melodramatic rather than tragic,” attests to its failure to meet mid-Victorian moral-aesthetic criteria.11 The complete abstinence which the artist unreservedly espoused was a contentious and potentially antisocial view. The Bottle aligned with the often-histrionic behavior of the teetotallers increasingly dominant in the temperance movement, who demanded exemplary abstention on the part of middle-class moderates. Teetotallers tended to be working class, and as an organized lower-class movement, were suspected of being Chartists or radicals, even subversives—fears which peaked in the years 1847–1849. Since it was the lower classes who were perceived as the problem drinkers, it seems strange that writers on Cruikshank detected “middle-class comfort” in the opening setting of The Bottle. But there need be no anomaly: this level of simple comfort, with its plain floor carpets (gone in the second plate) defines the family not so much as lower-middle class, but rather upper-lower class, the head of the household a successful, employed skilled worker or artisan—the kind who, if he abstained entirely from drink, could according to teetotal theory (and indeed practice), rise to eminence, even to become mayor of a major British city.12 Opposition to the morality of the story, like the best known, that of Dickens, centered on its exclusive focus on individual willpower, rather than on the environment of poverty, unhygienic housing, and unemployment. Given that Dickens’s perspective was widely shared, this may well have impacted sales. The artist was apparently left with piles of

14  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

unpaid bills; his enormous labor spread over many months, when he was crippled by insolvency, was quickly forgotten, along with the piles of pamphlets preaching the kill-joys of abstinence, printed at his own ruinous expense, leaving him “10,000 pounds the poorer” (Patten). The Temperance movement was said to have “achieved very little”;13 its heyday in the 1830s and ’40s was followed by a decline, hastened by hopeless attempts at legal prohibition, and the continuing diversionary inroads of temperance extremism (aka teetotalitarianism). After the succès de scandale of the initial publication, sales of the real thing under attack actually rose. Alcohol consumption in Britain reached a peak in the 1870s,14 unimpeded by Cruikshank’s only major, later contribution to his obsessive crusade, The Worship of Bacchus (1862–1864), deemed a “gigantic failure.”15 Curiously, Cruikshank and his work are entirely absent from the considerable modern historical Temperance literature.16 If poverty and squalid living conditions were to blame for drunkenness, as Engels pointed out, rather than lack of individual willpower, significant hereditary and psychological factors were recognized by many as contributors to the disease, but not by Cruikshank. The artist was a blinkered extremist, a fanatic, an embarrassment to his friends. We know, for instance, that he was capable of knocking the glass out of the hand of a well-wisher at a party. In modern times, Alcoholics Anonymous recognizes a complex of myriad genetic, psychological, and social factors, but also insists on total abstinence. Moderate and occasional drinking was impregnable as a near-universal social ritual. Alcohol was ubiquitous, small intakes were deemed an aid to health, it was used as a tincture for many medicines, and it was mandated by religious tradition in Holy Communion wine. The Punch editorial table was unthinkable without alcoholic lubrication and stimulants. Did the slight rise in wages and entertainments offering to distract the most vulnerable

Fig. 1-3. george cruikshank, The Gin Shop, etching, 1829.

make any dent? The advent of the music hall might have made the situation worse. The very harsh judgment of Cruikshank cataloguer Albert Cohn, the first inventorist of Cruikshank’s oeuvre, is not borne out by modern assessments, which are respectful, admiring, and moved by the artist’s evident passion. Both The Bottle and its sequel, The Drunkard’s Children, are imbued with a certain tragic dignity, unalloyed by Hogarthian satirical squibs. The glyphographic technique often said to coarsen the line may be seen as strengthening it, as Hogarth accomplished by choosing woodcut over engraving for his Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). He advertised these together with Beer Street and Gin Lane as done “in the cheapest Manner possible” in order “to reform some reigning Vices peculiar to the Lower Class of People.”17 These famous exemplary designs must have been at

the forefront of George’s mind, although he would not have approved the eulogy of beer over the evils of gin. In Cruikshank’s compositions of great clarity and simplicity (less so in the discursive The Drunkard’s Children), art, story, and moral are one, easy and quick to read. There is none of the grimy clutter or allegorical additives of his Gin Shop of 1829 (Fig. 1-3). In The Bottle, Cruikshank is polemical, to be sure, but not satirical. There is no trace of caricature. Poverty was the result, not the cause, leaving the degradation of the drunkard as a fatal destiny, and the murder of the wife as tragic crime. The scenario never deviates from the artist’s declared intent of “putting a stop to the poverty, misery, wretchedness, insanity and crime which are caused by strong drink,” “dreadful evils” preventable only by “UNIVERSAL TOTAL ABSTINENCE from all intoxicating liquors.”

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  15

While Cruikshank’s facial characterization has been seen as weak, it nonetheless expresses well the basic emotions and attitudes, the grief, anger, and fear that drive the episodes, which in turn with their laconic captions, are well chosen, described, and connected. The premier Cruikshank scholar Robert Patten, in a brilliant and lengthy chapter under the title (a quotation) “Masterpieces Worthy of the Greatest Painter,” succinctly encapsulates the narrative progression from celebration to comfort, from consolation to inflammation, and culminating finally in madness. This last affliction brings back a memory of Hogarth’s Rake. The older master’s presence is also felt elsewhere in the story. The décor, the room furnishings, and details of dress are all Hogarthian in spirit—realistic, symbolic, or significant, but never obtrusive or merely humorous. Given the high incidence of comic narrative in this era using a proto-cinematic montage that isolates and emphasizes objects as actors and agents (as for instance in the contemporaneous comic strips in the pioneering monthly Man in the Moon), Cruikshank’s use of props “in the melodrama of drink” are staged with fell purpose. This is Hogarth reborn a century later, truly a new age, as Cruikshank intended. But there were major differences. Three pillars of the state consistently stigmatized by Hogarth, especially in his major picture stories, were the church, law, and medicine. Cruikshank by contrast respects or idealizes all three. In a picture on the wall in the first plate of The Bottle, the church presides over the household, a reminder of religion—and marriage vows? Picture and bible by the third plate have vanished, a sacrifice to dissipation and debt. In The Drunkard’s Children VII (p. 31), the respectable, officiating clergyman turns away with a compassionate last look at the boy criminal, closing his prayer book to the pathetic death. The police in The Bottle VII, the prison warder in the next plate and in Drunkard’s Children VI (p. 30) are rendered with dignity; the doctor in The Bottle VII (p. 27)

16  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

looks pityingly at the murdered wife as he feels her pulse. All the many faces in the courtroom scene in The Drunkard’s Children V (p. 30) breathe respect for rituals and personae Hogarth could not take seriously or saw as corrupt (as in Industry and Idleness scene 10); even the condemned boy seems sad and apparently resigned or even penitent (as in VI, and in contrast to Hogarth’s defiant Tom Idle when he is deported), while the weeping sister of Cruikshank’s boy criminal, a suspect in the robbery, is mercifully pardoned. Respect for Law was upheld in the most Hogarthian of the painted picture stories of a later age, Frith’s Race for Wealth (1879).

The Sacrificial Wife The role of the wife has I believe been much misread. Hogarth, who spares no one, is generally harder on the men than the women. His Harlot and Countess are propelled (in the first place) into sexual vice by social neglect and preceding conjugal infidelity rather than their own free will. Is the wife in Cruikshank, by contrast, an equal and willing accomplice? The first plate of The Bottle (pp. 24–27) has been widely deemed to depict the wife as willingly taking a share of the proffered flask, and thus of blame. But let us look closer. In his caption the author describes the husband “inducing” her to “just take a drop.” She certainly smiles at the offer she takes to be innocent (as does the daughter), but her gesture—raised hand, open palm—suggests a certain diffidence, hesitation, even a touch of resistance and not acceptance. If Cruikshank, who was not a writer, had thought more carefully, he might have put “tempts” rather than “induces” into the caption. As early as 1874 a historian of satire states outright: “The wife objects.”18 The “official” verse commentary by Charles Mackay as published over a full page opposite each engraving, has the wife Lucy (as he names her) “shut her eyes to a future her struggling soul discerned.”

Naming her, and not her husband, is already a sign of respect. She certainly resists, and eventually, after having lost her baby to neglect, with violent words of reproach brings murder upon herself. Lucy is described as provoking her hideous husband’s murderous attack, for her “tongue was dipped with poisonous scorn.”19 Her hatred for him, her justified contempt, is boundless. And she is physically courageous. Has her attempt to seize from his hands the tankard in VI (p. 26), and then the bottle, “the Instrument of All Their Misery” as the caption says under VI (p. 27), lying broken on the ground, not provoked his homicidal fury? The Dutch version agrees (see note 19). Our hypothesis that contemporary readers would have intuited the wife’s resistance as transcending the role of helpless accomplice in sin, seeing her as active and courageous, sufficient to provoke the husband’s fury and thus her own death, accords with Temperance historians’ generic observation that “drunken husbands were often stung by the wife’s silent or open reproach into wife-beating for which Englishmen were notorious abroad.” Many Temperance leaders were women sensitive to the lot of the wife, abandoned when the husband went drinking at the local pub, and abused when he returned home. Some were feminists sympathetic to other social reforms, notably the antislavery movement; “the very act of joining a teetotal society involved a modest form of feminism.”20 The very fact of constituting a working-class movement of any kind was deemed subversive, another reason for the middle classes to shy away from it. The termagant wife, by contrast, was a favorite topos of the day. Punch, fresh from the success of Douglas Jerrold’s arch-misogynist Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures which ran in the magazine for thirty-six episodes in 1845, and in innumerable editions in following years, attaining proverbial status. (It was deemed to have “saved” the early Punch.) Now it offered a typical antiwoman perversion on Cruikshanks’s celebrated title, called “The Glass,” a

Companion to The Bottle. This was a six-scene pictorial narrative with verse accompaniment, which has nothing to do with drinking, since “The Glass” here is the looking-glass, connoting female vanity, selfishness, and extravagance, which like drink can bring a husband to debtor’s prison and his wife to a life of drudgery.21

Sequel: The Drunkard’s Children The sequel, called The Drunkard’s Children (published a year later, July 1, 1848, also in variously priced editions), follows their fate on the downward path with drink that “seems an accessory in a whole culture of vice.” The Drunkard’s Children’s relative lack of success has been attributed to the disturbances and disruptions of the revolutionary year 1848. The captions are now longer, the connections less evident. Since the children are already shown well dressed at the end of The Bottle, one assumes that what the father cannot afford is at the expense of their morality. Is the young girl actually a prostitute? Contemporaries would have assumed so. It would have been impossible for Cruikshank, any more than for Dickens with Nancy in Oliver Twist, to openly portray the drunkard’s daughter as a (teenage) prostitute; but contradictory as it may be to his basic theme, Cruikshank cannot resist depicting billowing skirts expressive of delight in the sensual pleasures of the dance, in which the daughter is the central figure: in isolation of the context, she seems cast as an embodiment of the joys of relaxation, decent if only the surroundings were. The link between alcoholism and prostitution was widely recognized; the daughter has clearly taken to the streets, even if she is shown cavorting in the kind of gaudy “gin palace” designed to attract men hungry for more than drink. The barmaid is another potential victim; we see her pouring drink, just visible behind the crippled, haggard old man third from left in Pl. 1-9, and far left in Pl. 1-10 (p. 28),

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  17

always vulnerable to male lechery. She is as likely to be accosted as Cruikshank’s drunkard’s daughter by a bawd-procurer, with her potential client close to hand, just as in Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress I. On a sign in the tavern, tobacco is explicitly prohibited to “gentlemen”—except at refreshment time. Although no decent female would be seen indulging in the common male habit, the “forbidden weed” is shown being smoked by both male and female (including the barmaid). Some teetotalers added to alcohol a prohibition on tobacco; Cruikshank himself gave up his pipe about this time. Here is another contentious point: the sabbatarians, on the fringe of the Temperance movement, were accused of wanting to banish much popular pleasure from Sundays, including dancing and the selling of liquor; they even wanted the new National Gallery shut on that day. The fate of the drunkard’s son in part follows that of Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice, although Cruikshank’s respect for church and law differed notably from Hogarthian irreverence. Hogarth exposes the Anglican church mirroring personal decay and corruption in Rake 5 and Harlot 6. The Law in Hogarth is pilloried everywhere: in the two Apprentices where Justice judges Crime on perjured evidence, in the Lord Mayoral banquet as an occasion for sheer selfish greed, in the callous cruelty epitomized in the butcher-judge figure of the Reward of Cruelty (1751)—and above all in the ludicrous The Bench (1758). Cruikshank’s honoring of legal procedure was maintained by William Powell Frith in his most Hogarthian painted narrative, the five-part Race for Wealth (1879), where the financier is on trial at the Old Bailey in a scene where the law operates with decorous solemnity.22 But Cruikshank’s sequel is above all remembered for its stark, monumental tableau of the girl’s suicide from Waterloo Bridge. This dramatic design impressed even Gustave Doré when he came to design his London, A Pilgrimage, visiting the locales he sought escorted by Cruikshank bi-

18  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

ographer Blanchard Jerrold, and meeting the artist himself. There is bitter social history embedded in this tragic dénouement, as in the father’s ending drunk-mad in a lunatic asylum (like the Rake in Hogarth). Suicide would have been recognized as a not uncommon recourse and perfectly credible at a time when “intemperance and insanity, the two greatest curses of civilization . . . [were] so intimately connected,” and when an increase in mental asylums was accompanied by a decrease in those released.23 Cruikshank’s friend Thackeray would have sympathized. His mentally disabled wife had attempted suicide. If only, wonders Patten, Cruikshank’s emancipation from drink had been followed by his emancipation from the tyranny of the marketplace. This much was not to be. Less compelling than The Bottle as its sequel may have been, one would not wish it substituted by the plan, which never materialized, to run The Bottle subsequently as it were backward: dependence on the bottle surmounted by taking the Teetotallers’ Pledge, thus bringing the family from indigence to prosperity instead of the reverse.

The Toothache From 1847, despite the publicity attending the sequences on drink, Cruikshank was much less in demand, except for trivial assignments. He was also seriously in debt, and among the small projects he engaged in must be counted one of some importance, although little regarded in the literature: his collaboration, in 1849, on The Toothache with Horace Mayhew, brother of Henry, famous for his London Labor and the London Poor. As a radical and bohemian member of the Punch fraternity and occasional contributor to this and other journals, Horace knew what he was about. He had proved a fertile inventor of subjects for caricature (in Punch, for instance), and edited Cruikshank’s Comic Almanac, which hoped and failed to rival

Punch. The Toothache was probably his idea and was surely intended to attract attention, whether from its peculiar format, or its subject matter painfully familiar to just about everyone, but to which no moral opprobrium was attached, as it was to alcoholism. (In earlier centuries, the toothache was sometimes blamed on addiction to the “sweets of life” including the sin of sex.) In this major thematic departure, unless you were actually at the moment afflicted by dental trauma you could enjoy the scenario as the best Cruikshankian comedy and farce. After the direst tragedy, the purest farce. But I have found no evidence of public response. It appeared to be safe in a peculiar, child-associated format. Credited on the cover/title page “Imagined by Horace Mayhew and Realized by George Cruikshank. To be had of D. Bogue,” The Toothache was at the time called a “roller picture” (pp. 33–40). This one comprised forty-four drawings, available quite cheap at 1/6d plain and 3/- hand-colored, printed on a narrow, glued-together strip of paper which folded together into a tiny concertina of 5 by 3 ½ inches, the perfect size for young and old to fit into a small pocket. At its full extent it would reach 82 inches, not advisable (if not impossible: my own outstretched arms are not long enough) to attempt in a crowded omnibus or railway carriage, and in practice most often read comfortably in a succession of smaller segments. The peculiar format may have picked up a hint from Man in the Moon magazine, which had started publication at the very beginning of 1847, incorporating its (more awkward) twice-folded pull-out plates. In The Toothache, farce reigns supreme, allowing the artist a respite from the moral rigors and difficulties of work on The Bottle and The Drunkard’s Children. Standing at opposite ends of the artist’s expertise, the conjunction at one time of two such totally different works is extraordinary. The success of The Toothache in England is impossible to determine. Physically it would have been too small an item to be noticed by the English press, or much

since (as far as I know), although it was reproduced in a colored facsimile in our own times by the Victoria and Albert Museum. But like The Bottle, it crossed the channel in copies broken down and inserted to fit inside the journal pages, to France (by Nadar, 1851 and 1856),24 and Germany in the family-oriented Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung (abbreviated, 1860). The latter may have come to the attention of Wilhelm Busch, whose comic strip Der Hohle Zahn (The Rotten Tooth, 1862) bears some resemblance; likely it prompted Baudelaire to note that the English artist was at this time copied in France, where caricature of dentists and dental procedures was quite popular. Patten, exceptionally, does take succinct notice: “Free from any moralizing about Temperance, light-hearted and spirited . . . The Toothache sparkles as a playful, empathetic, rueful and altogether funny jeu d’esprit.”25 It was truly a reversion to the artist’s “classic” caricatural style, a climax of wit and fun generally lacking in the late 1840s and early ’50s. The subject found the artist: The artist’s natural resort to great exaggerations of facial disfigurement, all that horrific swelling, posits the toothache itself as caricaturist of our face and physical dignity. The Toothache commands our special attention for its graphic vocabulary and the flow of its narrative, as well as the broad metaphoric range the subject enjoyed (if that is the word). The graphic dexterity and diversity—the changes in panel size, the close-ups, the cut-offs and escalations of motion—suggest that given the right scenario and armed with his usual graphic tricks, Cruikshank could have done more with such narrative—if there had been a sure market for it, which The Man in Moon had briefly tested, with uncertain results. The bulk of the story is constituted by pain and terror unalleviated by the “240 infallible cures,” then current for dealing with dental pain. (These included Cruikshank’s chief bugbear, alcohol, although in this case the sufferer also tries smoking.) The lesson is that these remedies are archaic, useless, and some-

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  19

times even make things worse; the artist must have hoped the narrative itself would constitute a healthy deterrent to relying on folk tradition. Yet it was just such a tradition that diagnosed a cold draught as the primary cause, as shown (is it really Cruikshank’s own “editorial” view?) on the front cover/title page, where “The Origin of the Toothache” is sleeping by an open window subject to malevolent (literally, demonic) draughts. The actual extraction procedure occupies no less than six drawings of escalating intensity, all seen from the back and thus discreetly hidden from us, and representing a minute of agony experienced, as the caption reminds us, as an hour. We do not quite see how it is all managed—only the flailing legs and overturned chair denote an agony tactfully enhanced by a visual vacuum. It was left to Wilhelm Busch, some years later, to devise oscillation patterns, novel expressive graphic codes for the nonpareil quintessential pain of tooth extraction. Almost all older pictures of dental operations show the dentist equally visible with the patient, working from behind and above; today the dentist usually works facing the patient. In Cruikshank’s early caricature Tugging at an Eye Tooth (1821), the dentist, exceptionally, is shown working from the side. Now, after the first of the sextet of images in which he battles to extract the tooth, the dentist commands (mostly) from behind. The crowd of afflicted youngsters we have just seen in the waiting room, the equivalent of the spectators in earlier imagery of public fairground extractions, dread to hear even if they cannot see the operation. They were brought by their schoolmaster, himself afflicted, and bear witness to what is otherwise unknown to dental history, that school-organized group visits to the dentist were made at this time.26 The martyrdom, the nightmare is private, and veiled from our direct gaze, and the technician, now something of a scientist, is depersonalized. The precision of his art, but not the pain, is concealed. This dentist is not so up to date as to use the new

20  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

chloroform, or laughing gas—and his work is no laughing matter.

The Politics of Tooth-pulling With The Toothache, Cruikshank the comedian is back in form. It is worth noting that the artist had also been busy during the late 1840s not only with The Bottle and its sequel, but also with comic theatrical roles mounted by the Society of Amateur Players run by Dickens and companions, which must have offered him therapeutic distraction, just as it did to an overextended Dickens. Such diversion would have been not only from his graphic labors, but also from a life of “a nearly insupportable overlay of crises, financial and domestic” (Patten). Dangerous chemical addiction and a momentary physical pain are of course very different, but beyond both, and the artist’s conscious intention, we may find a deep metaphorical substratum here relating to the political stress and violence experienced at this time all over Europe. It is a truism to see much caricature and cartoons generally as both distraction from and reaction to stress; this is no stretch here, if we draw parallels with the French treatment of the topic, which (as noted) sometimes included copies of the Cruikshank. The British polity survived the revolutions of 1848–1849 relatively unscathed. The middle classes both feared and desired the radical surgery of Reform; the oscillations and uncertainties of the reformers themselves are reflected in our hero’s attempts, twice, to flee recourse to the dentist with each momentary cessation of pain. Unlike the agitated French, the British were left relatively tranquil, it is often said complacent, largely satisfied with the myth of class reconciliation—can we see this in the embrace of the patient blessing his tooth-pulling “savior” (the word used in the French version, visually implied in the English)? Reconciliation, and sidelining or postponement of real reform,

was affirmed in Britain in the interest of the wider European hegemony and industrial superiority, to be symbolized in the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851. The bourgeoisie may have had to sacrifice a tooth of two to a benign higher power, but they received in exchange physical health, political stability, and normal pleasures. In The Toothache, all this is signaled by the final image on the back cover, showing the patient relieved of pain, brushing his hair, none the worse for his ordeal. In the French version, the happy patient goes dancing; in the English, he ends up sitting down happily to a dinner so enormous that one suspects a Cruikshankian swipe at a John Bull type—portly, self-indulgent, and greedy, a familiar of Punch and elsewhere. A good meal to seal his and the dentist’s success may be the just reward of courage and rescue from suicidal intent, imagined in a noble, Roman fashion, by means of a sword-like red-hot poker thrust down the throat. The sensible Briton, fearful and backsliding as he may have been, has overcome the challenge to his radical aches. In all branches of medicine, as in all branches of politics, charlatans abound. A few years preceding The Toothache, a cartoon probably by Alfred Crowquill, announced “the Chevalier de la Ruse, Officer of the Legion of Honour, Surgeon Dentist to [various princes] and most of the illustrious personages at Madame Tussaud’s . . . recently arrived in London, eminently qualified former itinerant mountebank and conjuror.” There followed a long, horrendous description of the extraction of a single tooth, involving finally a windlass,27 as in Cham’s comic strip, Story of Monsieur Jobard (1840). The French distrusted their dentists as much as their politicians, immunized from attack by the censorship. “Do people love their princes? No more than fearful souls their dentist” went an aphorism of the time.28 There survived from the long tradition of more or less comic iconography of tooth-pulling in Europe, and especially in France, of dentist, charlatan or quack, the residue of the tooth-puller’s

symbolic function as a remorseless, unscrupulous power figure. He is a tyrant taking advantage of the lower-class sufferer, who undergoes a nonpareil martyrdom (the term was used), a hellish-like torture fringing on death at the hands of ignorant, brutal men, the kind the German poet Heine called a Zahnhenker, tooth executioner. This negative characterization, however, emerges much qualified in the large number of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of dentists, who are presented like Cruikshank’s as dignified gentlemen known to be, in the context of Dutch advances in medical practice generally, conscientious and skilled by dint of sheer specialized practice.29 In fact, the status of dentist and dentistry were generally changing at this very time, with increasing professionalization, and dedicated dental schools appearing in the 1850s. It was above all the use of chloroform as an anesthetic (preceded by nitrous oxide from 1844 and ether from 1846), which began to alleviate the pain, although not in the popular practice of Cruikshank’s dentist. Apart from occasionally causing death, this expedient proved a dangerously tempting incentive to wholesale extraction. French caricature reflects this, notably in the person of the super-rich vainglorious dentist Georges Fattet, who claimed to have invented dentures made of a mysterious and patented substance called osanores, outrageously advertised to the public in the street. Fattet must have been a major financial sponsor of (investor in?) as well as constant advertiser in Le Charivari, where Cham among others gently mocked him. Fattet’s favorite remedy, facilitated by chloroform, was wholesale extraction, with great benefit to the ease of his patients’ smiles and mastication, not to speak of his bank account. Out with one? Out with all. There was a generalized fear that a dentist would extract the wrong, good tooth rather than its bad neighbor. Significantly, Cruikshank’s patient is told, by the dentist’s servant as he awaits treatment, “to be very particular in pointing out the Tooth, as yester-

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  21

day the Dentist pulled out a wrong one by mistake.” This honest (if not indiscreet) admission must have increased our hero’s terror. Total extraction and replacement by dentures, favored for financial reasons by the British National Health Service as late as the 1950s, has happily receded. The French fear of (and/or addiction to?) wholesale extraction, as opposed to Cruikshank’s “mild” British oral cure at the cost of a single tooth, may be partly explained, on the caricatural-metaphoric level, by the ever-present French fear of governmental repression and censorship, which relented only momentarily in 1848, the year of revolutions. In Cham’s early graphic novelette The Story of Monsieur Jobard (1840), the old sadistic “demon-dentist” is still at work, with his crazy extractive machinery, ripping out the good tooth instead of the rotten one.30 In the Cruikshank it is not the dentist, but the dental pain which is literally demonized, and embodied in the nightmarish figure with a face bloated like the sufferer’s own, brandishing a corkscrew as a weapon. This moment reminds one of the much earlier allegorical engravings the artist, in what amounted to a sub-specialty, made to illustrate the agony of various common middle-class maladies like headache, colic, and gout. The further trajectory of the dentist as power figure and tyrant politician would take us too far. In England, unlike France, tooth-pulling was not, as in France, a popular subject of journal caricature, although Ireland was regarded as being “Paddy’s bad tooth” inviting extraction (1868). It may be that in Britain the subject was considered too delicate to bear representation—and mockery. The subject’s proliferation in France brought forth telling political insinuations: under the chloroform of Napoleonic plebiscites, her democracy is extracted; Italy awaits Time, the dentist, to pull the rotten tooth of Napoleon III; Prussia’s Bismarck pulls the teeth of neighboring powers. There is revenge, too (a rarity): in a French comic strip of the prerevolutionary years 1869–1870, just before the Franco-Prussian War, the

22  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

dentist who extracts the wrong tooth gets murdered by his patient. In Germany, Wilhelm Busch showed something of a sadistic obsession with the theme of rotten teeth and tooth-pulling. Bottle and Toothache: a sociopolitical situation subtends two graphic narratives that could not appear to be more different, though produced at about the same time by the same artist. In both, personal health is tied to morality: alcohol and sound teeth both required some self-control, and obedience to higher (medical and virtually political) authority. Temperance preached self-discipline. The dentist is rivaled for cruelty and greed in England in a later age, when the comic strip had become more violent and reckless. Busch aficionada cartoonist Marie Duval, in Judy, a pseudo-feminist journal, gave tooth extraction a savage twist. A Tale of the Tooth, 1871 (p. 422) shows a lover sacrificing an eye-tooth for his beloved, to replace one of hers lost in an accident, only to discover the dentist has transplanted it to a stranger. The lover has his other eye-tooth drawn, renewing the torture, over which the artist says, “let us draw the curtain on the hideous details, showing only agonized fragments of a leg and hand.” After he has “crawled, crushed and maimed into the loved one’s presence,” her shock at his facial distortion causes her to break off the affair. This female callousness makes a political point, perhaps, in a year when women in England made notable gains in legal power within marriage. Its timing of publication, in November 1870, at the height of the dreadful Franco-Prussian War, also evokes recent French cartoons of Bismarck extracting the teeth of neighboring powers.

The Volunteers After The Bottle, Cruikshank was busy with lesser work, his later career overshadowed by the huge failures we have mentioned: The British Beehive and The Worship of Bacchus.31 The 1850s brought about

another bruising when Dickens blasted Cruikshank for infecting his traditional Fairy Library tales with Temperance ideology. For our purposes we may linger for a moment on the extensive effort Cruikshank put into the Volunteer movement, to which Patten pays exceptional attention, and which is an important dimension of Cruikshank’s life. The Volunteers were a voluntary, amateur but government-sponsored kind of home guard intended to supplement domestically based soldiery regarded as inferior (numerically) to the French. They take their place in our study here as the preoccupation of several comic strips by Charles Keene (p. 289–91). The Volunteers were more or less gently mocked over decades of cartoons in Punch, and not only by Keene, coinciding with Cruikshank’s intense, even blind devotion to the movement. However gentle and well intentioned it may have been, Punch’s mockery would have constituted yet another reason for the venerable hyper-patriotic caricaturist to have nothing to do with the magazine he had long before spurned. A Volunteer revival started in 1859–1860 in response to French armaments and Napoleon III’s annexation of territory from Savoy. After the Grand Review of June 1860, witnessed by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Cruikshank’s own memories of his anti-Napoleonic satires from the very beginning of the century, his chance to fuse the Temperance crusade and patriotism in the raising of a Temperance regiment, combined to bring his militancy to a fever pitch. He wrote and illustrated a semi-serious pamphlet, among many others, called

A Pop-gun Fired off, in defense of the Volunteers. The pellet misfired, costing money Cruikshank could not afford. As a Volunteer continuously busy with all kinds of duties, for which he was ill-suited, he had difficulty enforcing the kinds of discipline Keene shows as disregarded. George’s demand moreover for complete abstinence naturally caused trouble: he would have tried to prevent the libations of the innocent “convivial evening” of Keene’s Camp Life at Wimbledon (p. 294); and shown no sympathy for the plight of Irish Private O’Locker finding himself mercilessly billeted in a Temperance hotel.32 As to Volunteer maneuvers and drills, Cruikshank seems to have been present almost every weekend in 1865. His British Beehive of 1867 ranked the Volunteers as the third and equal defensive arm of the state after the army and navy. The Volunteers’ prestige, at its highest in 1868, waned after admission of lower middle classes (such as Keene’s incompetents), and septuagenarian Lieutenant-Colonel George Cruikshank resigned his command in the late ’60s. The man considered by many as Britain’s greatest graphic artist of the century, as a kind of new Hogarth, died leaving debts of £3,235. A broadside In Memoriam of February 1878  applauds George Cruikshank under the heading Painter, Philanthropist, and Patriot as painter of the Worship of Bacchus, designer of The Bottle, and Temperance crusader. The term “caricature” does not appear.33 At his funeral, the pallbearers were headed by Volunteers.

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  23

Pl. 1-1. george cruikshank, The Bottle, 1847, glyphographs. Plate i. the Bottle is Brought out for the First time. the husband induces his wife ‘Just to take a drop.’

Pl. 1-2. The Bottle, pl. ii. he is discharged from his employment for drunkenness. they Pawn their clothes to Supply the Bottle.

24     g e o r g e c r u i k S h a n k : t h e “ n e w h o g a r t h ” ?

Pl. 1-3. The Bottle, pl. iii. an execution Sweeps off the greater Part of their Furniture. they comfort themselves with the Bottle.

Pl. 1-4. The Bottle, pl. iv. unable to obtain employment, they are driven by Poverty into the Streets to Beg, and by this Means they Still Supply the Bottle. george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  25

Pl. 1-5. The Bottle, pl. v. cold, Misery and want, destroy their Youngest child: they console themselves with the Bottle.

Pl. 1-6. The Bottle, pl. vi. Fearful Quarrels, and Brutal violence, are the natural consequence of the Frequent use of the Bottle.

26  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

Pl. 1-7. The Bottle, pl. vii. the husband in a State of Furious drunkenness, kills his wife with the instrument of all their Misery.

Pl. 1-8. The Bottle, pl. viii. the Bottle has done its work – it has destroyed the infant and the Mother, it has Brought the Son and daughter to vice and to the Streets, and has left the Father a hopeless Maniac.

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  27

Pl. 1-9. george cruikshank, The Drunkard’s Children, 1848. pl. i. neglected by their Parents, educated only in the Streets, and Falling into the hands of wretches who live upon the vices of others, they are led to the gin Shop, to drink at that Fountain which nourishes every Species of crime.

Pl. 1-10. The Drunkard’s Children, pl. ii. Between the Fine Flaring gin Palace and the low dirty Beer Shop, the Boy thief Squanders and gambles away his ill-gotten gains.

28  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

Pl. 1-11. The Drunkard’s Children, pl. iii. From the gin Shop to the dancing rooms, from the dancing rooms to the gin Shop, the Poor girl is driven on in that course which ends in Misery.

Pl. 1-12. The Drunkards Children, pl. iv. urged on by his ruffian companions, and excited by drink, he commits a desperate robbery.—he is taken by the Police at a three-Penny lodging house.

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  29

Pl. 1-13. The Drunkard’s Children, pl. v. From the Bar of the gin Shop to the Bar of the old Bailey it is but one Step.

Pl. 1-14. The Drunkard’s Children, pl. vi the drunkard’s Son is Sentenced to transportation for life; the daughter is Suspected of Participation in the robbery, is acquitted.—the Brother and Sister Part For ever in this world.

30  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

Pl. 1-15. The Drunkard’s Children, pl. vii. early dissipation has destroyed the neglected Boy.—the wretched convict droops and dies.

Pl. 1-16 The Drunkard’s Children pl. viii. the Maniac Father and convict Brother are gone.—the Poor girl, homeless, Friendless, destitute, and gin Mad, commits Self-Murder.

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  31

Pl. 1-17 to Pl. 1-23. george cruikshank and horace Mayhew, The Toothache, Bogue 1848. roller picture. (as published here, arranged two to a page.)

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  33

34  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  35

36  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  37

38  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?  39

40  george cruikShank: the “new hogarth”?

Chapter 2

THE MAN IN THE MOON (1847–1849)

Albert the Great

T

he Man in the Moon, a magazine mentioned in journal history only as a gadfly of Punch (to which role we return below), came to me as an exciting surprise. It announces a new era in comic strips, hitherto ignored: a “rebirth” as it may fairly be called in England, a newborn laughing in a somewhat lunatic way (appropriate to its title), bursting and crackling on the journalistic scene in the New Year like seasonal fireworks. Fireworks there are, literally, in the first long, complete stories attached to the character of Mr Crindle, an extravagant youth given to extravagant adventures, created by editor Albert Richard Smith in collaboration with Henry George Hine. Crindle’s exploits and dreams (and nightmares) are nonpareil (pp. 57–65). The Man in the Moon, the journal that fueled this (Crindle’s) unique performance, and the succeeding comic strips in the magazine, died alas too young: after its launch in January 1847, it survived only until August 1849, through pivotal years of European revolutions. Like most of the political revolutions, which were also short-lived, the graphic novelty of The Man in the Moon apparently was out of tune with the times, and not imitated. Subsequently, in England, the comic strip pursued an erratic course, and stood much more on the dignity required of cartooning generally, aspiring to the credible and factual, rather than the fantastic, which is closer to the French caricatural model, generally avoided by Punch. The editors of The Man in the Moon were Albert Smith and Angus Bethune Reach. The latter remains a rather obscure figure, but Smith,

41

although ignored by posterity as a writer of comic strips for The Man in the Moon, is not. Even as a writer, Smith was compared to Dickens, and elicited several biographies. His colorful career embraced a kaleidoscope of expertise, starting with a medical degree (a fellow student was John Leech), and qualification in surgical dentistry, which he never practiced. Smith was above all journalist, best-selling novelist, comic performer, showman, and raconteur of his mountaineering exploits. He also wrote plays and dramatic criticism, and did magic shows. It was mostly as comic showman that he shone and was remembered, attaining a popularity, it was said, akin to that of Madame Tussaud’s or the Tower of London.1 After The Man in the Moon, Smith as writer of comic strip scenarios disappears from sight, in order to dedicate several years to The Ascent of Mont Blanc, a one-man show he invented, a unique media mix of diorama-panorama-musical-accompaniment-lecture, which staged reenactments of his mountaineering exploits with lavish scenic effects and amusing commentary by Smith himself. He performed this piece 2,000 times between 1852 and 1858, before great crowds including royalty, which made him rich. Smith’s own mountaineering feat, on August 12, 1851, was to drag himself up the mountain, ill-prepared and unfit as he was, and have himself finally dragged up, almost insensibly, to the summit. His theatrical celebrity was enhanced by other ascents, twice by balloon, in one of which, in 1847, he nearly died, as recounted in both The Man in the Moon and the Illustrated London News (Fig. 2-1). Smith’s Ascent of Mont Blanc has much in common with the comic strip as another kind of new “mixed-media” performance, a literary and visual form prone to the farce and accidents of exotic travel. The show had moments of sheer fun, like Smith and company sliding down the mountain slopes, or racing bottles down them, or silliness such as Saint Bernards hauling barrels of chocolate for the children in the audience. Such frolics on Swiss snows would be illustrated by Gustave Doré in his

42  THE MAN IN THE MOON

comic strip album Displeasures of a Pleasure Trip (1851). Doré had copied the Smith-Hine Crindle for a French magazine the year before. Comedic travel unites the work of Töpffer, Cham, and Doré, the French precursors to Smith’s first collaboration with Hine on Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career, whose journeys are meant to be funny and entertaining. Doré, then aged nineteen, paid a unique homage to the English novelty by copying it wholesale, a telling recognition from the country that rivaled and surpassed England in the realm of caricature and normally had no need to borrow; certainly, the overfertile Doré did not. Although slightly adapted, his close copy of the Smith-Hine Mr Crindle retained its exceptional length (152 woodcuts, filling five issues of the Journal pour Rire 1852, and reprinted in the Petit Journal pour Rire 1860).2 Never averse to self-promotion, moreover, the French artist shows himself as a tourist, in the album Une Ascension au Mont Blanc (1852), seated in an Alpine chalet chancing (with an attentive cow) on the very same Crindle-derived comic strip in the same Journal pour Rire. Doré’s previous, album-length account of an ascent of Mont Blanc, Desagréments d’un Voyage d’Agrément (Displeasures of a Pleasure Trip), is full of comic incidents, like being caught up in a waterwheel, or rolling down the slopes in a snowball,3 the sort of thing Smith reenacted on stage. The launching of The Man in the Moon coincided with its acquisition of an autobiographical piece by Cham about a visit in London, which I regard as an essential trigger for more in the same format, as we shall see. The new monthly periodical boasted of and clung to its acquisition of a young but already distinguished foreign name, even as it could boast of “the cream of the London literati” and artists: Phiz (illustrator of Dickens), Kenny Meadows, and H. G. Hine.

Fig. 2-1. trip in the nassau Balloon. illustrations in The Man in the Moon, 1847. in reality, the accident was nearly fatal (from Fitzsimons).

The Man in the Moon versus Punch Albert Smith started in early Punch, with some French-inflected “Physiologies”—until 1844, when he abruptly left. He felt insulted by the editorial staff, Douglas Jerrold and Mark Lemon, who found him “vulgar and bumptious,”4 while the snobbish Thackeray “detested” him. Later, in command of

his own journal The Man in the Moon, Smith took personal revenge; this is evident in Crindle and again in Touchango Jones, Smith’s second comic strip story there, where twice he took swipes at a newspaper Jerrold had founded, Douglas Jerrold’s Newspaper (aka Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine), and also made a “brilliant and devastating parody” of Jerrold’s style.5

THE MAN IN THE MOON  43

Punch had no comic strips yet, neither could it match The Man in the Moon in jokes generally—or so Smith claimed. Smith had a sketch of a stupefied-looking man captioned “Portrait of a gentleman finding a joke in Punch”; it showed a sad Mr Punch holding a sign saying, “I have not made a joke for many weeks. (A real case of Distress).”6 The Man in the Moon was not the only journal to accuse Punch of plagiarizing its jokes, or simply repeating old chestnuts. Many Punch graphic jokes are self-repetitive, even or especially with the ever-popular John Leech. Jokes then as today tended to circulate, and origins are hard to pinpoint. Part of the problem may have been that Punch itself, in accepting a joke usable in a drawing or caption suggested by word of mouth from an outsider, was unaware of its possible print provenance. So The Man in the Moon proposed an Act for Incorporating a Society to be called the Joke Copyright Protective Society.7 It is quite possible that the convenient recycling of ready-made jokes inhibited the development of original graphic narrative, which was slow to take root. Despite its frequent swipes at Punch, surely it is an exaggeration (or downright mistake) to assert with all the Punch biographies that The Man in the Moon was in “explicit competition with the older journal” and was “dedicated almost entirely to humorous attacks on Punch.”8 One affair, involving an obscure theatrical figure called Alfred Bunn, occupies all of ten pages in the major Punch history by Spielmann. The infighting among organs of the press, then as now (vide Private Eye9), may have actually helped build circulations, and detains us here to suggest that the first comic strips of the era, if only they could prove sustainable, and the magazines survive, were meant to attract new readers. Henry George Hine (1811–1875), self-taught landscape painter, who drew three of the best Man in the Moon comic strips, had been among the very first artists hired by Punch, where he met Smith; he was also credited with the decorations for the best-selling Punch Almanac for 1841 that helped rescue the

44  THE MAN IN THE MOON

magazine from an early financial crisis. We do not meet Hine again after his collaboration with Smith, author of his scenarios. Contributors flowed in the opposite direction too, for it was anti-Punch verses by “star-writer” Shirley Brooks in The Man in the Moon that caught the eye of Mark Lemon, who hired Brooks away to join Punch. Brooks shone there, and after Jerrold’s death in 1857, he became second editor and was responsible for hiring George Du Maurier. The Man in the Moon, one among over eight hundred periodicals launched in 1840s London, cannot have regarded itself or been regarded as a direct rival to Punch. One has only to hold the magazine in one’s hands, as the relevant authorities obviously did not, to see and feel the difference, in periodicity and format alone, not to speak of content. The Man in the Moon was a monthly, not a weekly like Punch and so many nominally rival comic magazines in mid-century. In format it was half the size of Punch, a pocket book like a Bradshaw railway guide with a folding plate like Bradshaw’s; at sixpence it was three times the price, with sixty or sixty-four much smaller pages (about 5 by 4 inches), to Punch’s ten pages at 11 x 8 1/2 (like the present volume). The (literally) outstanding folding plate (10 inches by 14) with the comic strips, which proved both nemesis and attraction, can be seen as a kind of equivalent of the Punch full-page political cartoon, with content of course much different. I have argued elsewhere that the comic strip replicated in some measure the rhythms of the railway journey: often short, or episodic, engaged in movement, frequent stops and starts, disruptions of time dimensions, offering strange acquaintances, physical adventures, dangers feared or real, accidents.10 The dramatic expansion of the railways carrying 48 million passengers already in 1845, increasing from 3,000 to 6,000 miles 1846–1850, was a vital factor in the appetite for and circulation of comic magazines from the ’40s onward. Comic magazines liked to remind readers with masthead notices that they were available at every railway stall in Britain.

Albert Smith, who also wrote for the august Illustrated London News (one of The Man in the Moon’s backers), on September 2, 1848, placed a small ad that I chanced upon, announcing “a number intended to take the world by storm. The demand will be unprecedented. All the railway stations are to run extra trains on the day of publication [etc., etc.] . . . A number which will dazzle the eyes of Europe.” The Man in the Moon further described itself (ILN September 16) as “A Monthly Review and Bulletin of New Men, New Books, New Plays, New Jokes, and New Nonsense; being an Act for the Amalgamation of the Broad Gauge of Fancy with the Narrow Gauge of Fact, into the Grand General Amusement Junction” (a play here on railway technology). This was followed by a selection of flattering affidavits from a dozen provincial newspapers (no London ones), recommending the new monthly for the counteracting of ennui, bad weather and the pains of life generally, and as particularly suited to accompany the traveler by railway or steam-packet. The Man in the Moon, “which goes just as well upon the French railways as it does upon the English ones,” was openly on the lookout for help from across the channel. Was the illustrious French artist Paul Gavarni an option? He arrived in London on December 21, 1847, but proved antisocial, unapproachable. Having from the start landed—and quickly lost, as we shall see—the singular prize of Cham, the magazine later tried again for French talent, but in the end dismissed the submission by some unnamed “talented young artist” with his awful pictorial puns as falling between French and English tastes in humor.11 He sounds like a Cham recommendation. This distinction in humor styles was felt at the time to be real; here we pursue rather the similarities. Cham was considered very French at home and abroad. À propos his parodies of Eugène Sue’s Juif Errant (which were known in English translation), Le Charivari in 1845 said Cham displayed an “English manner,” having “sucked the milk of British humor married to English wit.”

Enter Cham and the French Connection Was it by chance that twenty-nine-year-old Amédée de Noé, younger son of the ancient house of the counts of Noé, found himself in London, in late 1846 and early 1847, visiting his sister married to a Captain Manners, at the moment when a new comic journal was founded? Cham, as Amédée de Noé called himself, can hardly have been looking for more work, or intending to help launch a new, untried magazine. He was well established in Paris, and already known in England under his pseudonym Cham (after the second son of the biblical Noah). Starting in 1839 he had published, anonymously, two substantial comic strip albums (small graphic novels, at thirty-five and fifty-two pages), under the titles Monsieur Lajaunisse and Monsieur Lamélasse, conceived under the aegis of Rodolphe Töpffer, but original in the sparkle of their farce. He soon followed these up with parodies of fairy tale and classical myth that were taken over in England, a hilarious albeit misogynistic satire on “old maids” and their desperate mamma (Deux Vieilles Filles à Marier), and another album on his own valetudinarianism. In 1845 Cham helped disseminate Töpffer in L’Illustration by transferring onto woodblocks Töpffer’s Cryptogame from the Genevese artist’s original, unpublished drawings, to be printed for a mass audience in weekly installments. Even before a French album version could be made, enterprising specialist publisher David Bogue in London brought this out in an English edition. By this time Cham was already fully engaged as a regular contributor of caricature, single spots, and full-page lithographs as well as graphic narrative, for the daily Le Charivari, where he joined Daumier and Gavarni; he was also a favorite of the weekly L’Illustration. Cham’s visit to England gave him material for Le Charivari in a series of satirical “Moeurs Britanniques,” that is, stereotypical British customs, which ran from November 1846 to June 1847. This was then published, in the usual way, as an album,

THE MAN IN THE MOON  45

which must have been much enjoyed in England, and sealed his reputation there, together with his illustrations to the Charivari’s parody of Eugène Sue’s Juif Errant (1844–1845), as mentioned. Armed with a letter of introduction from his Parisian publisher Charles Philipon and copies of all his published albums, Cham made a critical connection with the Vizetelly brothers, who ran the Pictorial Times and cofounded the Illustrated London News, the English model for L’Illustration. The Vizetellys had done an English version of Cham’s Barbe Bleue, a parody of the Bluebeard fairy tale, and sought him for regular contributions, as did (perhaps) Punch. (We learn of Punch’s efforts to attract Cham and his work in an anecdote first told in the early Cham biography, and repeated in English sources, including my own History of the 19th-Century Comic Strip.12) Irrespective of Punch, which one can well imagine putting out feelers toward the French newcomer, the cultural elite of London stood open to Cham. He met Dickens and Thackeray. The latter, a known Francophile and connoisseur of French caricature, gave a “hurricane welcome to this devil of a Frenchman who had more wit in his little finger than all the caricaturists of London put together in their heads”—a judgment quite unfair to George Cruikshank, who also met Cham and wrote affectionate dedications on the unpublished drawings he presented to him.13 Cham shone also as a brilliant conversationalist, in a language familiar from his English-language school in Boulogne, his English governess, and probably his father who had served, in exile from revolutionary and Napoleonic France, in the British navy. Albert Smith, an insider with London’s cultural goings-on, obviously got wind of the Frenchman’s presence and immediately grabbed him. The delivery of Cham’s first contribution may have come late, after the first issue was planned at the end of 1846, but not before Smith had included Cham’s name on the prospectus, in the company of elite artists Phiz (H. K. Browne), A. Mayhew, Kenny Meadows,

46  THE MAN IN THE MOON

and others. This caused some confusion, even disappointment, given Cham’s absence at the launch of The Man in the Moon in January 1847. A note to “Our Subscribers” at the end of the second issue (p. 124) set the record straight, with elaborate apology: “We are most anxious to do justice to an artist connected with our work, who has had some reason to complain. In the hurry and confusion attendant upon bringing out the first number of a new serial, we omitted to give the name of Mr T. H. NICHOLSON, as the inventor and draughtsman of the tragedy of Don Guzzles of Carrara. The omission was the more annoying, as one or two of the papers, in their courteous notices of The Man in the Moon, attributed the designs to another artist . . . known as Cham, the principal artist engaged on the Paris Charivari.” Cham was, however, duly and conspicuously credited in the title of his two productions immediately following, while Thomas Henry Nicholson had neither signed nor been credited; was he miffed at the omission, and was this why he quit the magazine? Cham’s name, by contrast, given in the frontispiece from the start, persisted well after he had left, down to the fourth volume, and in the fifth the term “native and foreign artists” must have been intended to include him. The obscure Nicholson, whose other work gives no inkling of his comedic talent,14 in this one-time only effort called The Life and Adventures of Don Guzzles di Carrara sets the tone for the succeeding Man in the Moon lunatic farces (p. 54). The Spanish serenader falls off a ladder into a moat, escapes from jail by becoming thin enough to slip through the bars (like a character in Töpffer’s Monsieur Crépin, p. 42), and ends up lying prostrate on the ground to the astonishment of a passerby. A continuation was clearly called for. Cham easily picks up the fun: with part 1 of his The Foreign Gentleman in London (p. 55), he is very much himself, opening with his favorite topic: the traveler accosted on his arrival by a fierce band of porters and cabmen. The dread threat of being be-

headed by an English “guillotine” window sash is followed by the pleasures of a huge English bed (resembling in size the Bed of Ware), where the artist imagines himself lying “like many English dramatists.”15 Pleasures? The artist is lost “in a desert” and “prey to the blackest misgivings,” allowing him to introduce, as he had done before in French albums, his favorite graphic shock of a plain black panel.16 Unless, of course he was anticipating the terrors of being run over in the streets by cabs, known to be the most dangerous of any city in Europe, or imagining the equally unpleasant dangers of being tossed by bulls in Smithfield Market, or attacking him in the countryside. (Tourists to Smithfield were warned against bulls on the loose by Richard Doyle in his Manners and Customs.) Part 2 of Cham’s Foreign Gentleman in London opens with a French caricatural topos transposed to London as English: the natural elective affinity of soldiers courting nursemaids in the parks. After the hazards of a stray cricket ball in the eye, and the tourniquet entrance gates jamming his knee, the hapless foreigner retires to the seaside, at Ramsgate, where he determines to leave “perfide Albion” (foreshadowing no doubt Cham’s imminent departure from the magazine) when nearly pitched down a cliff by a blind donkey. (Dickens would have much fun, in David Copperfield, with the perilous clifftop donkey rides, to the immortal refrain “Janet, donkeys!”). The Frenchman leaves behind, perhaps to his regret, a sight we see appreciated by males, and an alluring novelty to foreigners: Englishwomen bathing in the sea relatively naked, segregated from the men, if not from telescopes on the clifftop. At this spicy moment Cham leaves the Man in the Moon (having already left the country?), recalled by urgent work in Paris. He cannot have been expected to settle in England. He certainly did not have the motivation of Gavarni, who took refuge in London in order to avoid jail. Nor was Cham afraid of any revolution in his homeland.

Smith and Hine, Crindle, and More By now, after three issues each containing a comic strip on a twice-folding plate, the innovation was held to be successful, and continued. After the truncation of the Cham project, Smith, in collaboration with his former colleague, Punch artist H. G. Hine, determined to write and draw scenarios of their own. Already known as a novelist, Smith decided to take on the picture story à la Cham in a big way: his first story, probably outlined in simple sketches of his own to be worked up by Hine, was to last nine installments to a total of 141 drawings, the extent of a small Töpffer album, though a little shorter than the French copy mentioned above (pp. 57–65). The inheritance granted to the English Crindle character (50 pounds versus the 100,000 crowns— about $2.5 million today—received by the French Crindle) allows the heir to indulge in a new coat and a monocle, while his French counterpart contemplates buying a complete expensive new toilette. In France, expectably, the love interest is enlarged, with some other differences I have described elsewhere.17 I have no trouble crediting the three stories about Crindle and his successors to the same Smith-Hine duo, for the method is consistent throughout: crazy story line matched by amusing graphics. Cham is certainly a major influence here, as is Töpffer, and one may add sparks from Cruikshank, but the amalgam is at any rate arresting and so much ahead of its time that there were no descendants, perhaps until the silliness of the squibs or gags (not extended narratives) of Ally Sloper and McNab of that Ilk decades later. The cinema gives us the key term: montage—but gone wild, with a mix of pictography, pars pro toto (synecdoche), hyperbole, variable framing, telescopic perspective, and depth of field. The pars pro toto in itself is remarkable: the sharing of a sherry cobbler is reduced to two opposing straws, diffusing (or concentrating?) its erotic connotations;18 police baton and fleeing heels signal danger and flight,

THE MAN IN THE MOON  47

with many other examples of a device that looks to the future, all from Crindle alone. The attempt to render graphically the disordered vision of the drunkard, later perfected by Wilhelm Busch, gives us the fractured image (p. 58), and the relative disorder of the vignettes here and elsewhere and their varying sizes on the page spices the impression of increasing moral and physical disorder. Money spins the wheels of fortune and fate. Like William McConnell’s Wilderspin ten years later, Crindle starts with an inheritance. Wilderspin is episodic; Crindle less so, for he is always, continuously, break-neck on the run, Töpffer-style, within and between installments. Paradoxically, it is the episodic in much fiction, whether in Pickwick Papers or Smith’s earlier novel The Adventures of Mr Ledbury (1844), where the first nine chapters can be readily imagined as so many pages of comic strip, that tends to prevail in Cham and Richard Doyle as well as McConnell. Smith adopts a kind of filmic continuity, emphasized in the use of the cliff-hanger, to use a term familiar from serial literature and television drama. Part 1 of Crindle, after the familiar drunken behavior and losing of the house key, ends on the hero falling into a water butt where “he must remain until next month,” a phrase added as if to allay the fear that this story like previous ones will stop short (p. 57). Again, Crindle’s philandering makes him (and us) wonder whether “he has made an impression . . . or has not will be seen next month.” The dream of sudden wealth leading to ruinous extravagance and illicit courtships is coded as typical of reckless lower-middle-class youth. After more accidents the ambitious Crindle, by a theatrical seating fraud, misses opera sensation Jenny Lind. Homeward bound, he accidentally crashes through a lollipop merchant’s window. Pursued by the “stout proprietor” of the lollipop shop, he somersaults into Vauxhall Gardens—and its famous dream world. But there his “nightmare” begins. Via adventures underwater and underground, he is suddenly transported by Neptune to

48  THE MAN IN THE MOON

the Piazza San Marco in Venice, where he engages himself as a human firework, and fleeing the stout proprietor (again), he takes refuge in a tree “to stay until daybreak, which will take place on the first of next month.” There follows a chain of pursuit, reminiscent of Töpffer’s Cryptogame—Crindle-stout proprietor-Arabs-police-street urchins “and the public generally,” tossed by bulls into the bargain— the speed of the chase signaled by the use of tiny silhouette figures. Crindle jumps onto a steamer, is turned adrift, and is abandoned on a buoy. Assailed by strange birds, masters (sic = monsters?) of the deep and a shark, he is saved by a gang of smugglers, and picked up by Moorish pirates, again as in Cryptogame. The graphic rhythm is reminiscent of early Cham. Landing in Boulogne as a suspect, violently assailed by hotel touts, Crindle is still haunted by the dread stout proprietor, who tries to strangle him and swings him up in the air into wakefulness. The nightmare is over. Ecstatic, forswearing all extravagance, Crindle becomes a barrister and settles down to a happy married life. This experience, dreams and all, is suffused with Smith’s actual memories of recent visits to the Royal Gardens in Vauxhall, mentioned by name in the strip, and in his fiction. These gardens were a chief attraction of London, not-to-be-missed from its founding already in the seventeenth century, and visited by luminaries from Pepys and Samuel Johnson to Dickens and Thackeray. “With Hogarth’s help [in the decorations] the gardens were a sight to dream of.”19 It must have been there that Hogarth’s young Countess Squanderfield had her erotic (and fatal) meeting with Counsellor Silvertongue. In decline under the management of Alfred Bunn from 1841, the Gardens enjoyed a momentary revival in the later ’40s, remembered by Smith in Comic Tales (1852), before finally closing in 1859. The long episode in the middle of Crindle is indeed, literally, a dream, which brackets the story as part-nightmare and part-nemesis.

Linger for just a moment. In the Vauxhall Gardens with Crindle, we enter a projection as yet distant from comic strip or graphic novel at its widest and wildest expansion into our own times: for its extravagance and elegance, for the multifariousness and decorative color and entertainments, for the world of fantasy and phantasmagoria, transportation into exotic and historic cultures and places. The Garden’s vaunted ballet, opera, music of all kinds, pantomime and puppet shows—way better than Disneyland, I would say. Smith-Crindle do not have time and space to show all, of course, but we get a good taste: fireworks (“just in time,” as one tried to be on site), waxworks, grottoes (here, an audacious sculpture of a naked nymph under a fountain, closely embraced by a hapless Crindle, pl. 6 scene 1), lakes, fountains which submerge our hero and with the help of Neptune—turn Vauxhall (literally) into Venice. Here from the famous campanile of Piazza San Marco, a guardian figure, a “fearful personage” that Smith calls Diavolo launches Crindle on a rope, fireworks attached to feet and hand. Was this the real-life Juan Bellinck, the “King of all Devils” who at this time flew himself—and his infant son—through fireworks in fiery balloons? The circus-style feats on tightropes, for which in real life “rope dancer” Madame Saqui was paid enormous sums—100 guineas a week—were a particular attraction, as were the acrobats, whose pyramid miraculously saves Crindle from a tree. The termination of Crindle allowed The Man in the Moon to announce the reprinting of the nine parts, “in a stitched wrapper,” price two shillings (which I have not found). Crindle’s celebrity via The Man in the Moon now is such as to earn him a place in the magazine’s version of the big annual Royal Academy exhibition—that is, among the dozen parodies, à la Cham in the Charivari, of pictures hanging there. The plaudits heaped on the magazine, cited in The Illustrated London News advertisement as “inimitably ludicrous,” “grotesquely comic,” and

“brimful of mirth and satire,” are tributes chiefly, I believe, to Crindle, whose career was just complete. Strong in the success of this brave new project, Smith-Hine followed up with a shorter story: The Surprising Adventures of Mr Touchango Jones, an Emigrant (pp. 66–69). Emigration—economic, political, personal—was much in the air during the repressive, “hungry forties”—averaging 250,000 per annum from Britain alone and increasing in the 1840s. The impoverished worker and family are presented in popular art and illustration taking leave of their native land with a heavy heart.20 But for others it was an opportunity for improvement, a new and better life adventure. The character Touchango Jones enjoys an adventure as crazy as Crindle’s, and more geographically exotic, a fantasy bid in fact for colonial conquest in Africa, another real-life opportunity. Jones’s objective reason to make a secret escape is the commonplace fractious marriage, like Crindle fleeing the “stout proprietor” into the world of the imagination. Jones’s dreams are of magical travel overseas and encounters with nautical folk or fairy-tale phenomena. He lands in Quashybungo, peopled by “Ethiopian minstrels,” and not yet a colonialist target, where he is robbed of his few possessions, notably his umbrella, by a baboon that accidentally saves him from a pair of lions “where we leave him to hang by the monkey’s tail for thirty days”—actually, as we learn at the start of part 2, for an hour and three quarters. Stupidly cutting the tail below his grasping hand, he falls between the lions, which are scared away by the sight of Jerold’s (sic) Newspaper. This glib disparagement of the rival paper acquires some moral weight here and again a moment later for its campaign against the death penalty, which now faces Jones. Bird’s-eye views of fleeing animals and the cannibal preparations to eat him offer contrasting very close-up and distant views. For their part, the natives regard the reading of Jerrold’s Newspaper as a hanging offense, from which Jones is saved by transfer of the penalty to the courtly Bones,

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a parody of the “nigger minstrels” (white performers in blackface) invading Britain at the time. In a classic imperialist ploy, Jones wins the instant love of the Quashybungo queen, an event that he consecrates by killing and replacing the king. At this point, in March 1848, reality breaks in with a vengeance: the February Revolution in France, signaled by King Jones sprouting a pearhead under an umbrella, the satirical emblems used by French caricature to represent King LouisPhilippe. The French king had in fact just abdicated, after the prohibition of an opposition banquet and the ensuing rebellion, which are fatally imitated by King Jones. The popular violence facilitates Jones’s escape via chimney, washing tub, and a British ship, such as had in reality rescued the French king. The antics of a whale, borrowed perhaps from Töpffer’s Cryptogame, culminate in Jones being fished up by an albatross, and his royal French head restored to normal. A balloon released from Cremhorne Gardens (which has now overtaken Vauxhall in popularity) manages to hook him in midair, a reference to author Smith’s own near-fatal

journey in the summer of 1847 in the Green Nassau balloon (cf. Fig. 2-1).21 The levity of the magazine and its balloonatics had a not untypical near-tragic outcome in an age of balloon mania, of which caricature (by Cham and others) took full advantage. Ballooning carried many a French comic strip adventurer deep into the skies. The launch of a balloon, like that of a virgin ship, was heralded by champagne, alcohol being a not unusual accompaniment on board, but one cannot imagine drunkenness (as illustrated here) was ever the cause of the craft losing all direction and exploding. Was this explosion also that of the Revolution simmering, but no more, under threat of Chartism in Britain? The Man in the Moon meanwhile tried to allay its fear of the dramatic events in Paris with Cham-like cuts ridiculing eight Heroes of the Revolution and portraying them as children at play. No worries, the generalized precipitation lands Jones through a skylight into his own bed, the arms of his wife, and unalloyed enjoyment, spiced by the reading of The Man in the Moon.

Revolutions Then, Real and Imagined—and Revolution Now? the timing of the irruption of the French February revolution simultaneously into history and a comic strip, leads us nolens volens to a brief excursion to the present day and the historical crux we now face. as this book goes to press, we are in the midst of the great, massively disruptive and “revolutionary” covid-19 worldwide viral pandemic, massively lethal, with death rates soaring, especially in Britain and the uS. apart from much hindering of the production of this book, the pandemic has also coincided with massive popular outrage. the cry Black liveS Matter, a relic of historic slavery and centuries of racist prejudice and official brutality, is joined in worldwide protest in the uS under this and like slogans, some demanding not mere reform of the current capitalist system, but revolution! no leSS, and an end to the road to fascism. the French revolution of 1848, which would have repercussions all over europe, generated serious comic strip scenarios as noted below. it is here reflected in the distorting mirror of a pear-headed and thus royal-looking touchango Jones, his elevation

50  THE MAN IN THE MOON

corresponding exactly to the French republicans taking power in February 1848. this answered long-standing popular repression, everywhere. the whiff of revolution in the uS today emanated also from the numerous oppressed minorities of europe, including the uk. as i write, widespread uprisings here in north america have been provoked by video-recorded, blatant evidence of racist police brutality in a much-publicized series of wanton murders by white police of helpless, unarmed black people. these crimes were virtually defended and abetted by the current, unapologetically racist uS president, who fanned the flames. Such violence against blacks is of course as old as slavery itself. the first napoleon restored slavery in haiti in 1802; the advent of napoleon iii in 1848 threatened to do the same. the long-standing guilt of the white masters and the slave trade raised the question of “reparation” or “compensation.” was the intended killing of Jones to be seen as a kind of “reparation?” during the couple of decades before 1848, when, as many readers of The Man in the Moon must have known, abolition was much contested, repression continued: in 1831, 30,000 to 60,000 men and women in Jamaica, the largest and most productive of British colonies, rose up in revolt, committing little personal violence; in reprisal more than a thousand black people were lynched or shot on sight or summarily executed. in 1833, the British parliament enshrined in law the Slavery abolition act granting full emancipation in the colonies. the year 1839 saw the founding of the British and Foreign anti-Slavery Society which tried to outlaw slavery worldwide, and the following year the Society, under the name anti-Slavery international, held a convention in london, which hosted prominent uS abolitionist Frederick douglass. context by looking ahead: below i take note of the so-called Mutiny of indian natives of 1857, long virtually (if not legally) enslaved, when sepoys (indian mercenaries in British pay, like all natives popularly considered black) rose and took a murderous revenge on the foreign occupiers. this was punished by the British military with unspeakable atrocities against civilians (including women) and soldiers alike—see the disgusting celebration in Punch on our p. 102. the blatant racism continued in Punch ad nauseam, its relentless anti-irish barrage has the usual semi-savage irish republicans, now refugees in Jamaica, being literally kicked out of that colony (december 16, 1865). governor of Jamaica John eyre had just used the relatively peaceful Morant Bay rebellion in october 1865, to kill many hundreds of innocent, unarmed people including women and children. the British public was roused in protest. But Punch ignored it until the new Year 1866, when a full page by tenniel showed a clerical figure named Stiggins (after the unpleasant nemesis of Sam weller in Pickwick Papers), arm in arm in friendship with a black man, while he rejects the “white planter” standing disgruntled on the other side. the ever-patriotic Punch was at this time flooding its pages with charles keene’s repetitious cartoons and comic strips poking gentle fun at the domestic volunteers. it was local, white volunteers, on the home model, who did the killing of blacks for eyre in Jamaica.

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Police and other institutional abuse of west indian blacks in Britain has continued to this day, even after independence in the 1960s. racist policies “under the conservative governments of the past decade, ended up deliberately destroying the lives of thousands of lifelong legal residents by treating them as ‘illegal migrants.’ in the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual budget—the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). not until 2015 was that debt finally paid off.” none of this money went to ex-slaves or their descendants. “it was all given to British slaveowners as restitution for the loss of their human property.”22 Popular reparation today in 2020 took the form of a popular guerrilla-style action that toppled the statue in Bristol honoring seventeenth-to-eighteenth-century slave-trader edward colston. touchango Jones survives a death sentence to be saved by the love of a woman, the Quashybungo queen, with whom after the death of the king, he might have shared power, but for the revolution which ousts him. Britain was saved from revolution—by a woman, maybe, Queen victoria, married to a successfully “invading” foreigner, Prince albert. revolution was anathema to most of the readership of The Man in the Moon. Jones’s promised a new stable order—at a cost. the French attempt to overthrow the existing British order had just been imagined, comically, by richard doyle in Punch with parody of the real, ancient French invasion depicted in the Bayeux tapestry, prelude, as it were, to Quashybungo’s which turned out to be only a nightmare. Quashybungo must be in africa, to be imagined as a target for conversion, conquest, and the slave trade. Man in the Moon editor angus reach liked the sound of the name, and used it verbatim in his fiction “romance” Clement Lorrimer, as a “pleasant tropical coast, where good missionaries have got possession of some twenty squares miles of land and two converts, who are continually striking for more wages.” ethiopia enjoyed a long, lucrative tradition in the slave business. the five ethiopian minstrels (our part 2 of Touchango Jones, p. 67), cast as cannibals preparing to feast on Jones (now slave meat?), would have evoked the ethiopian Serenaders, a group originating in the uS, and depicted as very black in the comic strip. they were in reality comprised, in their very popular 1840s British music hall incarnation, of working-class whites in blackface. the “bones” were a favored, typical instrument—useful leftovers from the expected feast?

The Man in the Moon’s next and last narrative pullout, surely another Smith-Hine collaboration, tells How My Rich Uncle Came to Dine at Our Villa (pp. 70–73). In three parts, it is much less ambitious than its predecessors—perhaps a sign of diminish-

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ing enthusiasm for the format? Our Villa looks grand, but the setting in a half-built industrial suburb with a half-built access road (in an uncontrollably expanding London) is not. The shoddily built house cannot stand the weight of the “revered” uncle,

whose girth is expressive of expansive wealth and attendant prospects of inheritance. To escape the leaking roof the uncle rushes into the dark (shown as a Cham-esque plain black square), is chased by the dog over a wall, to be greeted like a burglar by shots from the narrator’s own blunderbuss and apprehension by a policeman. The police station is inhabited by a miscellaneous gallery of miscreants, all meant as real types but one fictional (a confederate of Dickens’s Bill Sykes). The narrator too is stupidly arrested just for carrying his uncle’s clothes. The way home is marred by more accidents caused by the uncle’s obesity and a fraudulent claim by the policeman. This is thwarted by the most unlikely threat of counterviolence, making the cop confess his lies—as revealed by a bit of mutton wrapped up in last week’s Punch. This sense of the hostility, stupidity, and corruption of law enforcement, at a time of reprehensible Chartist disturbances, and the increased fear of criminals and crime, epitomizes a lower-middle-class attitude (irrespective of rich uncles) that runs through that essentially (lower)-middle-class phenomenon, the comic strip. The usual happy, celebratory ending is perfunctory compensation for so much travail—unless the fat uncle has more to offer than his glass.

The Magazine and Its Invention Deflate, to Arise No More What we celebrate as an ingenious innovation, the folding plate sporting the new caricatural genre, may have soon proved an embarrassment, cost-wise and otherwise. In content, it was not to every adult reader’s taste, and perhaps excessively so for careless children. The magazine’s final nine months, down to its expiry in June 1849 (No. 30), carried no plates or comic strips. At the head of No. 21 there appeared this sorry notice (here abridged and paraphrased): “By subscriber demand we have decided to omit the folding sheets, to be replaced by more illustration

in the text [poor compensation!] which stays at 60 pages. The shape of the sheet was found inconvenient, particularly in binding up sets of volumes, and very liable to accidental tearing and soiling.” No. 22 ran only a shadow puppet play about the exploits of General Macdonald in Ireland. The magazine had probably been financially shaky for some time. Smith, having prepared Touchango Jones, had reason to drop his name as editor (by volume 3), as did coeditor Angus Reach. The last issue carried the (false) news that the magazine “by popular demand” would henceforth appear weekly. Smith meanwhile had been to Paris to join in or watch the June insurrection, nearly getting himself arrested; back in London he got busy with journalism and novels. No longer in charge, he defended to the last his role in the magazine, even after it was dropped by its owner, the Illustrated London News’s Herbert Ingram, despite the reputation it brandished as one the cleverest and most amusing periodicals of its kind ever issued in England. A great idea—killed in the cradle, with an aftermath?? The premature demise of The Man in the Moon did not deter Smith from starting another monthly called The Month (from February 2, 1850), in active collaboration with Punch stalwart and old friend John Leech. One wonders whether, given his earlier dedication to comic graphic narratives, Smith did not encourage Leech to do likewise, in some way, in Punch, as we shall see the latter soon doing. We know Smith was firing off to Leech ideas for cartoons in The Month (1851), which promised well, and after its closure within the year suggested collaborating on a comic album for David Bogue, the specialist publisher (of Töpffer, etc.). Writing to Punch publishers Bradbury and Evans to express regret about The Month’s abandonment by its owner, Smith noted that the new magazine had been mispriced, and should have been sold like The Man in the Moon at sixpence, and “I know that The Man in the Moon sold, and how well, and with the smallest care it would have paid.”23

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54  THE MAN IN THE MOON

Pl. 2-1. t. h. nicholson, The Life and Death of Don Guzzles of Carrara, January 1847.

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Pl. 2-2-1 & Pl. 2-2-2. cham, The Foreign Gentleman in London; or the Adventures of M. Vanille, nos. 1 and ii, February and March, 1847.

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Pl. 2-2-2. cham, The Foreign Gentleman in London; or the Adventures of M. Vanille, nos. 1 and ii, February and March, 1847.

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Pl. 2-3-1 to Pl. 2-3-9. albert Smith and henry g. hine, Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town, parts 1–9, april to december 1847.

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Pl. 2-3-2. albert Smith and henry g. hine, Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town, Part 2.

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Pl. 2-3-3. albert Smith and henry g. hine, Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town, Part 3.

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Pl. 2-3-4. albert Smith and henry g. hine, Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town, Part 4.

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Pl. 2-3-5. albert Smith and henry g. hine, Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town, Part 5.

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Pl. 2-3-6. albert Smith and henry g. hine, Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town, Part 6.

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Pl. 2-3-7. albert Smith and henry g. hine, Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town, Part 7.

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Pl. 2-3-8. albert Smith and henry g. hine, Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town, Part 8.

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Pl. 2-3-9. albert Smith and henry g. hine, Mr Crindle’s Rapid Career upon Town, Part 9.

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Pl. 2-4-1 to Pl. 2-4-4. albert Smith and h. g. hine, The Surprising Adventures of Mr Touchango Jones, an Emigrant, Parts i–iv, January–May 1848.

T H E M A N I N T H E M O O N     67

Pl. 2-4-2. albert Smith and h. g. hine, The Surprising Adventures of Mr Touchango Jones, an Emigrant, Part 2.

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Pl. 2-4-3. albert Smith and henry g. hine, The Surprising Adventures of Mr Touchango Jones, an Emigrant, Part 3.

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Pl. 2-4-4. albert Smith and henry g. hine, The Surprising Adventures of Mr Touchango Jones, an Emigrant, Part 4.

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Pl. 2-5-1 to Pl. 2-5-3. albert Smith and h. g. hine, How my Rich Uncle Came to Dine at our Villa, Parts i–iii, June to august 1848.

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Pl. 2-5-2. albert Smith and h. g. hine, How my Rich Uncle Came to Dine at our Villa, Part 2.

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Pl. 2-5-3. albert Smith and h. g. hine, How my Rich Uncle Came to Dine at our Villa, Part 3.

Chapter 3

PUNCH— A HISTORY OF CULTURAL FRANCOPHILIA AND POLITICAL FRANCOPHOBIA

S

ince Punch looms so large in our study, we must look briefly at its beginnings, and beyond. Punch is far and away the best studied humorous weekly of the age (and lasting far into the twentieth century); its importance as a cultural barometer is generally recognized and cannot be exaggerated. Taken together, the hitherto ignored political comic strips from Punch central to our topic throw light on Franco-British political relations, and reflect Punch’s consistent francophobic foreign policy. For those who can manage it, as background to what follows, I can recommend the 718 pages of the comic, fascinating and irritating 1000 Years of Annoying the French.1 Britons increasingly perceived France as both rival and threat—as a “sweet enemy,” as historian Robert Tombs has called the relationship. The old enemy was now, in mid-century, perceived as closer than ever, especially with the advent of rail to the ports and steamers across the narrow waters. In the literary sphere, this proximity is reflected in Punch’s subtitle, “The London Charivari,” which it kept on every page, and far into the next century, to remind us that its model and initial inspiration was the French satirical daily, the best known of its kind in France and at this time repository of the best French comic art. The word charivari was not English: in normal French usage a charivari describes any kind of raucous popular din or racket, often satirical or socially hostile in purpose (in the US, shivaree, and in England, skimmington are equivalents). At the beginning of the French film The Return of Martin Guerre, a rude

73

village charivari mocks the sexuality of the eponymous character. The adoption and permanent retention of the French term by what would become the century’s most successful British humorous journal, presupposes an ambition to exercise some form of collective social control transcending the crude individualistic anarchy of the historic Punch character known from the puppetry tradition. France’s Le Charivari, launched in 1832, was in format quite different from Punch: it was a daily of four letterpress leaves, with the insertion of a single large lithographic illustration printed of necessity separately, with a few small woodcuts commenting on articles appearing on the other editorial pages. Born a decade later, Punch remained from the start a ten- (occasionally twelve-) page issue published weekly on Saturdays, with woodcut illustrations large and small scattered throughout, and including always one full-page politically themed design, from which originated the term “cartoon,” as we shall see. The founders were several young men, whose roles, credits, and merits are variously apportioned and detailed in the copious literature on the subject. We may single out as principals the brilliant, jovial, Falstaffian manager and organizer Mark Lemon and the versatile writer Douglas Jerrold, known as the wittiest man in England and rivaling Dickens in fame. Thackeray soon joined in and starting in July 1841, the magazine quickly acquired the outstanding humorous writers of the day and several of the best young artists, notably John Leech and Richard Doyle, creators of some of the best early comic strips and a host of comic drawings. They would be followed, working occasionally in the new genre, to the end of our period, by the galaxy of Punch regulars John Tenniel, Charles Keene, and George Du Maurier. Punch soon outstripped predecessors and rivals. This was partly because of the sheer quality of the art and writing, and partly because politically and socially, it moved in sync with the times, after a relatively radical decade, in which Jerrold was the

leader. With and after the Great Exhibition of 1851 Punch became less vociferous, less partisan, more accommodating, respectable, and family oriented, aiming at higher classes, especially of the numerous upper-middle, as opposed to the reform-minded lower-middle classes targeted by rival journals. In self-assessment Punch evolved into a “decent,” pure, and clean publication, an enemy to all vulgarity. Its essential decency was recognized in the satirically cautious comic strip—and it soon gained recognition as a power in the land, widely read and cited by the political classes. Punch henceforth aimed for the “well-bred smile where before it had been eager for noisy laughter and loud applause.”2 The original premise, “The Moral of Punch,” announced in the first number, offered more than “the amusement of the thoughtless crowd, and the collection of pence.” The magazine sought the role of teacher as much as jester, to be a preacher of kindness as well as critic of social abuses. After the early (Jerroldian) period of unabashed censure of the Tory aristocracy and discreet critique of the royal family, these bastions of British polity became regular subscribers, and the weekly sought upward stability. It was considered an honor to be caricatured in Punch; Disraeli and Prince Albert collected Punch portraits of themselves. “Caricature,” unavoidable as the term was, could be pejorative, more a French practice than English. Real social and personal hostility was not socially acceptable in England as it was in France, outside certain political topics forbidden by the French censorship. In the words of its first complete biographer, Punch thought of itself, grosso modo, as “The Royal Academy of pictorial satire,” with no use for caricature, which was seen as reflecting poor draftsmanship, and incompatible with a state of national prosperity and patriotic contentment. Caricature, it was said, is not humor but drollery and a form of satire that thrives only on the wrath of the multitude.3 Caricature is, in a word, foreign, hence the need for a new term for humorous drawing: cartoon to the rescue. It is intriguing to

74     P U N C H — c u lt u r a l F r a n c o P h i l i a a n d P o l i t i c a l F r a n c o P h o B i a

Fig 3-1. John leech, cartoon no. 1. “Substance and Shadow.” Punch, v. v, 1843, p. 22.

note that the term “caricature” was so well embedded that it was commonly used, negatively, outside the arts: Karl Marx, for instance, used the term to describe the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon in 1848. Caricatural or not, the English comic strip at its “rebirth” in the late 1840s remained categorically a lower class of humor, given to facile farce even as upwardly mobile Punch consciously muted more extreme slapstick and fantastic elements. Humorous was the broader passe-partout term. Punch’s texts, its cartoon captions and one-line “fillers,” indulged democratically in the simpler humorous forms, such as puns, while maintaining decorous forms of prose. From the start, Punch happily proclaimed itself “a refuge for destitute wit—an asylum for the thousands of orphan jokes . . . the millions of perishing puns which are now wandering about without so much as a shelf to rest upon!” The mania for puns

was imperishable and even if found tiresome today, it was quick if crude, a kind of cross-class vernacular, childish in its way like some of the drawing styles, from Doyle to Duval. Also from its inception, Punch declared itself an advocate for certain reforms, notably abolition of debtors’ prisons and the death penalty; more broadly, however, Punch’s “sympathy for the poor, the starving, the ill-housed and the oppressed . . . [as] not only a religion, but a passion” was a fervor that burned out after 1848 (Figs. 3-1 and 3-2). After some memorable cartoons expressing compassion for the poor and condemning the miserable pay given to female factory workers, and the notorious Christmas issue of 1843 featuring Thomas Hood’s “Song of a Shirt,” Punch henceforth abandoned the underclasses, except to make fun of them. They show up as cartoon cabbies, street urchins, crossing

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self, became “a scholar and a gentleman.” The comic strip in Punch, generally more “gentlemanly” or restrained than in its rival publications, is scattered over the whole period 1847–1870, but most in evidence in the decade of the 1860s, to coincide with what historians have viewed as a period marked by the literary decline of Punch. Was the comic strip (a term which did not yet exist) seen as a welcome innovation? Possibly—but not sufficiently for Punch to establish it as a regular feature.

Punch: Cultural Francophilia and Political Francophobia

Fig. 3-2. John leech, “the game laws; or, the Sacrifice of the Peasant to the hare,” Punch, v. vii, november 1844, p. 197.

sweepers, vulgar miners. These ridiculed classes are however not protagonists of the comic strips, they remain at best bit-players, most visibly in the single cartoons. John Ruskin complained loudly about this snobbery. Absent, too, from comic strips are the peasantry (as in the cartoon, Fig. 3-2), an important underclass good for a laugh, and a demographic minority in England by mid-century. So conspicuous in French caricature generally, like that of Daumier, in the comic strip form it is left to a Frenchman, Cham, to show the poverty and rebelliousness of the Irish peasantry, or the popular cavorting of Scots “provincials.” The crusading image of the 1840s was much due to the ill-dressed and -mannered Jerrold, who even as “the best humorous writer in England” was himself not considered a “gentleman” by his colleagues at Punch, which as a magazine evolved (in the words of the eminently presentable Thackeray) into “combed, washed, neatly clothed and perfectly presentable.”4 Mr Punch, as the magazine liked to personalize it-

Punch nurtured, nervously, ancient but always popular perceptions of French self-aggrandizement at British expense, which of course exacerbated long-standing imperial rivalries pre- and post-Napoleonic. Relative domestic security vis-à-vis the French did not mean acceptance of the haunting French revolutionary tradition. Following a standard historiographical view, we mark out the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a watershed representing a key stabilizing moment for Britain triumphant. The 1850s saw Punch’s point of no return toward respectability. Nonetheless, it was 1848, the year of revolutions, that sent a shock all over Europe and encouraged an antirevolutionary, anti-French fervor endemic to Britain sporadically through the 1850s and ’60s, while also stimulating the discovery and political uses of the new “French” graphic narrative genre. To reprise: The first “Rebirthed” comic strips sparked into life at the beginning of 1847, with a sort of Gallic, Cham-derived recklessness. The British propensity to borrow from French culture and art dated back to the seventeenth century, and reemerged in force after the fall of Napoleon. There was a lively exchange of artists and cultural products between the rival powers. Théodore Géricault published his English Suite in England, Frenchman Grandville’s Metamorphoses of the Day was plagia-

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rized by Briton Thomas MacLean. The French modeled several of their new illustrated magazines after England’s: the Magasin Pittoresque was inspired by England’s Penny Magazine, the French Illustration by the Illustrated London News,5 while the Charivari lent its very name to Punch. George Cruikshank, scourge of Napoleon I, returned the admiration which he earned in France. This was just an early phase of long-lasting cross-cultural bilateral contacts which affected caricature and comic strip. Many British artists were trained in and some lived in France for considerable periods—even Dickens did. Several Punch artists and writers were familiar with France, some were (more or less) French. George Du Maurier was partly French, both in name and ancestry, as he liked to boast; so was Ernest Griset. The Anglo-French cultural alliance was an entente cordiale beyond all political entente and mésentente. Cemented by Punch, “The London Charivari” paid permanent homage to the magazine founded by Charles Philipon in 1832, which brought publisher and its principal artist Honoré Daumier prominence as well as lawsuits, fines, and imprisonment. “Philipon was a hero to British journalists”6 and to artists like Cruikshank, who remembered well their own repression in England over the years. Punch would never be molested by the law, except in minor ways, but it was occasionally banned in France, for any French lèse majesté. The threat of debtor’s prison, that dread institution against which Punch and Dickens campaigned in England, had brought the Charivari’s second-in-command, Paul Gavarni, to Britain, where he stayed in willing exile for several years, waiting out the duration of the revolutionary disturbances, and embellishing English journals with his art. By 1840, Philipon-Daumier’s greatest (joint) single creation, the satirical character Robert Macaire, had already crossed the channel in a book called Robert Macaire in England written by George Reynolds and illustrated by Hablôt Browne. Unlike in the original, this Macaire is guilty of homicidal

violence. Punch used him as the stereotypical fraud to impersonate King Louis-Philippe. Awareness and cross-fertilization of all things French cannot be overstated. French example is ever close to British journalistic consciousness in various ways big and small, to the point where a whole English magazine was planned in close imitation of the French Journal pour Rire, a very successful large folio fully illustrated weekly founded by Philipon in 1848. This proved a timely spice to the French year of revolutions, but its English imitator across the channel, taking over the great size (about 18 by 22 inches) and the very title, The Journal for Laughter, was an instant failure, to judge by the one surviving issue from 1850 in the British Library. The French novelty was the introduction of large full-width comic drawings on all four pages, one of which in the British imitation spread across the back page. The latter told a very French story, drawn surely by founder-editor Watts Phillips, and set in France, where he had studied art at the time of the 1848 Revolution (Fig. 3-3). In a clichéd tale of foreign travel, The Bold Smuggler of Boulogne features an enormously, suspiciously bulky British would-be smuggler and his wife failing to deceive the French customs and being fined £100.7 Cham frequently visited England where he had close relatives, and he spoke English quite perfectly; Dickens, often in France, spoke fluent French. Punch often left bits of caption and other text in the original French untranslated, as did novelists such as Thackeray and Albert Smith. The novels of Dumas and Balzac, and others, went into English editions, as did Dickens into French. The far-reaching impact of Cham’s example, before and after his contribution to The Man in the Moon, and ever present in France, cannot be overestimated. Considered inimitable, he sustained the idea of the revival and durability of the new medium in England. The theater, to which caricature and artists were often closely allied, is another story of cross-channel influence. The British theater, in which most Punch

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Fig. 3-3. watts Phillips, “the Bold Smuggler of Boulogne,” The Journal for Laughter, March 16, 1850.

writers and artists dabbled, was well aware of French models. Comic strip author Watts Phillips was also a prominent actor and playwright; he stood accused of plagiarizing French plots. Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, conscripted into a small touring company, is expected to produce a new play in days—he has only to translate a French one verbatim. Punch joined with gusto in the press-driven Franco-British roller-coaster ride between amity and hostility for much of the period 1830–1871. The big Punch cartoon allowed itself a short-lived interval of political fraternity only with the advent of the Crimean war—honoring the soldier and not the commander, Napoleon III. The otherwise detested French emperor was treated temporarily with respect, at the time of this military mariage de convenance. The omnivorous anti-Napoleonic polemics of the Great Age of English Caricature were

not forgotten. The pacific lull or stasis more or less imposed by the victorious allies was broken momentarily by the 1830 Revolution in France, which brought King Louis-Philippe to power. For a decade or so, the Entente Cordiale held, despite French colonial expansion into North Africa. In the 1840s, relations deteriorated. The return with much pomp of Napoleon’s ashes to Paris, with British help, and his virtual deification, was a foreboding reminder of the popular persistence of the Napoleonic legend. The 101 Martello towers built 1803–1805 on the Channel coast stood as a permanent reminder of a very real invasion threatened by a huge professional army, a scare still fresh in the national memory. In 1840 there was a dispute, soon patched up, over rival imperial interests in Syria. In April 1843, the young Punch was temporarily banned in France for perceived caricatural slights to the French mon-

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Fig. 3-4. John leech, “the royal Fagin of France instructing his boys.” Punch, v. 11, (end March/early april), 1846.

Fig. 3-5. richard doyle, “the napoleon of Peace,” Punch, v. xviii (october), 1847, p. 155.

arch. In 1844–1845 a spurious invasion scare was whipped up by alarmists in and outside the British government, demanding more militia, naval preparations, and coastal defenses. In July 1846, Punch denounced the French occupation of Algeria. In the spring of 1846, the king himself came under attack in a “big cut” (full-page cartoon) titled The Royal Fagin of France Instructing his Boys (Fig. 3-4), Fagin being the arch-villain visually immortalized by George Cruikshank in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. As in Dickens, the French Fagin is shown giving street-urchins lessons in petty theft of pocket handkerchiefs, here embossed with the Spanish crown. The reference is to the French “theft” by marriage of Spanish child royals: the Spanish Queen, then only fifteen years old, and/or her younger sister. This started a series of Spanish marriage mock-ballads illustrated in a medieval style by Punch’s young acquisition Richard Doyle, and culminated in another big cut parody showing Louis-Philippe with the cunning smile

of the Philipon-Daumier trickster-crook Robert Macaire, here presiding over all his deceptive foreign policy ventures (Fig. 3-5). The Spanish marriage rankled. Louis-Philippe’s claim to be the Napoleon of Peace was subverted by Doyle’s full page showing him as a sinister complacent figure surrounded by a dozen lightly sketched scenes of warfare, from North Africa, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Cochin China: readable as a pictorial narrative of sorts, if not a real comic strip. Thus was set the stage for Doyle’s Barry-eux Tapestry (designs dealt with in detail below) based on a more serious invasion scare which would soon be abruptly cut short by a French “self-invasion,” the Revolution of February 1848. This in turn gave way to new waves of suspicion generated by volatile French governments, from the departing Louis-Philippe to the advent of a new Napoleon (III, the future emperor), a pair destined to be targeted in hostile comic graphic narratives. A French military invasion was never

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a force of 50,000 men. He brags of his capture and sale of London to the French, after jailing Mr Punch in the Tower where he awaits the guillotine. The following week’s big cut had the remedy: the Duke of Wellington, alarmist in chief, stirring up a smug and sleepy British lion. Lord Palmerston, M.P. and admiralty official during the first Napoleonic wars, was in the 1840s the primary anti-French militant. Many of his age would have remembered, and joined the 380,000 Volunteers defending England and London from the French threat in the early 1800s. He is scathing toward the French, who do not change: “The policy of France is like an infection clinging to the walls of the dwelling and breaking out in every successive occupant who comes within their influence.”8

Doyle’s Bayeux Tapestry Parody Fig. 3-6. John Leech, “A Silly Trick,” Punch, v. XIV, (January) 1848, p. 7.

countenanced; but widely feared was a French-style revolutionary “invasion” led by British Chartists, very militant at this time. History does not take the invasion scare of January 1848 seriously. Punch did, or pretended to, following the Duke of Wellington and Thackeray (in Vanity Fair, chapter 32), who saw the French as “pant[ing] for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation” (Waterloo). The big cut by John Leech in Punch’s first issue of the year mocks the scare with a fat John Bull (i.e., British Everyman) unperturbed by a ridiculous scarecrow figure made of straw and sticks, labeled “Invasion of the French” (Fig. 3-7). Believable or not, much exaggerated or quite delusional, the scare was good copy for a satirical magazine. Could the French invade Britain (via Ireland?) as easily as they did Algeria? That same New Year’s Day issue (p. 10) carried an imaginary bulletin from the dread Marshal Bugeaud, known for his ruthless conquest of Algeria, now appointed commander of

Could invasion threaten another Norman Conquest? Toward the end of January 1848, a fantastic historical parallel was imagined and reimaged by Richard Doyle. He was an old hand already, having joined the Punch staff as a nineteen-year-old in 1843. His Our Barry-Eux Tapestry is dedicated to Charles Barry R.A., chief architect of the planned new Westminster Palace, Britain’s seat of Parliament, which would replace the one burned down. Doyle fabricates a very loose parody of the famous eleventh-century Bayeux Tapestry. (This strange and marvelous performance, which has entirely escaped the massive Tapestry scholarship and commentary, deserves the full contextual analysis given here in chapter 4, Fig. 4-1.) There follows here just the immediate political context. The parody is offered as Mr Punch’s “cartoon” contribution to the massive government scheme to decorate the new Parliament buildings with murals on historical subjects. With the greatest topicality imaginable, the Barry-eux Tapestry commemorates, in advance, an invasion “which is to come off short-

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Fig. 3-7. richard doyle, Punch Almanack for 1848, v. xiv, illustrating July/august.

ly.” Doyle’s “Gothic” style of drawing accords with the taste of architect Charles Barry himself, who in the words of accompanying text, had “raised a middle-age building.” Doyle now offers a “middle age representation of a modern event [of the future].” At the start Punch ironically pretends to applaud “The Duke’s Invasion Letter [which] has been a great relief to thousands.” Nevertheless, warmed and whipped up by Lord Ellesmere and the Duke of Wellington, the invasion fever is clearly an absurdity, madness, and folly. It is a bad joke laid to rest by a corpulent John Bull confronting a group of French military men, the usual wasp-waisted figures

looking in this context hungry, to offer his “national defenses” in the form of a pile of plum puddings (Almanack, 1848). But in the same “prophetic” issue of the Almanack, Mr Punch asserts his own right of invasion, benignly of course but not without perils, all over the world, from the arctic and polar regions, to the desert wastes, where he goes native in turban and on camelback (Fig. 3-7). This is invasion justified as world exploration, penetrating the harem (below), while Mr Punch in cap and bells joins the British Leo (top) ogling the simpering Virgo of conquerable lands. The spear-toting Arab tribesman (right)

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means business, and real perils await: from truly menacing black tribesmen, and even certain death in the offing; and from the tiger who knocks Punch off his elephant. There is no chronological development here, but it is as if the dangers of imperialist adventure substituted for those of revolution abroad, and as a distraction—necessary or not—from peace at home. Two years later, in the Almanack for 1850, Doyle will show the pacific Englishman abroad caught up in continental repression of tourists in the aftermath of the failed revolutions, a theme he later incorporated into a real graphic novel (chapter 5). “Peace” with France is not to be trusted: opposite the last Doyle Bayeux design, the big cut, titled “Peace (?)” (and in parody of a well-known Landseer painting), shows Louis-Philippe as a sheep staring quizzically down the barrel of a cannon abandoned in the grass of the cliffs of Dover, while nearby the duke and the Prince of Joinville, commander of Doyle’s supposed invasion, converse—or negotiate? On the next page under the heading “What will the French do with Algeria?” Punch wonders, now that the Algerian resistance has been decisively broken with the capture of its leader Abd-el-Kadr, whether such French colonial victories do not whet the appetite of a monarch whose throne depends on them? Did the Barry-eux Tapestry finally give a (shortlived) credence to the possibility of invasion?

Doyle: The Revolutions in Paris The 1848 uprising in Paris was a momentous European event, first recognized in Punch by way of its mockery of the dailies “dealing out morsels of intelligence in doses of truly homeopathic dimensions.” The fragmentary quality of the news from France was reflected in some of the political confusion, oddities and conflation in a comic strip about the revolution that appeared in a minor publication called The Puppet Show (pp. 165–68). As if

Fig. 3-8. John leech, “Put out,” Punch, v. xiv, (February) 1848, p. 101.

to excuse itself from such a frivolous frolic as that of its comic rival, Punch finds that no cartoon large or small could do justice to the “chattering rumor” surrounding revolutionary events of such magnitude, distorted in wildly exaggerated reports, such as “Lamartine has been beheaded . . . all the English (in Paris) have been massacred.” Punch celebrated the finality of the deposition of King Louis-Philippe in a February 1848 issue with a big cut by Leech (Fig. 3-8) where, over the title PUT OUT, the cap of liberty serves to snuff out a candle (in an old allegorical/caricatural metaphor) with the king’s pointed pear-shaped head and coiffure conveniently shaped as a wick. The figure holding the candle-snuffer is as a well-armed worker. Punch (not yet over its radical 1840s) honors the role of the lower or popular classes in yet another foreign revolution. However, as it turned out, the 1848 revolution, like that of 1830, would be controlled by and for the

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Fig. 3-9. richard doyle, “Punch’s dream of Peace,” Punch, v. xx, (June) 1849, p. 253.

bourgeoisie—momentarily incarnated in Punch by a shabby, greedy pseudo-revolutionary Macairelike character on the following page. From “put out” to “played out,” Louis-Philippe retires from the European gaming table where Mr Punch-Britain, as croupier, spins the ball of the World toward Progress and (his own) superior claim to proper, constitutional government. The sly, smug racism of the Punch character is the key to his whole sociopolitical take on British and world affairs in the long era stretching ahead; “putting down” extends in the following cartoon to the tiny, diabolical Irish monkey (v. XIV, p. 147), subjugated by the huge, regal British lion. But history shows that peace is always a dream. Punch is cast as the dreamer nation in a big cut “Dream of Peace” (Fig. 3-9), where John Bull embraces everyone and has everyone embrace each other, all over the world. A prima facie humorous magazine

can be a force for harmony as well as antagonism. The Punch character can afford to rest while Europe wrangles. He has attained the status of pacific national monument, which makes for blandness and explains why the cartoons (and comic strips) in Punch are often so tepid at this time. Harmony and reform are the watchwords. Harmonization: looking ahead, Leech’s hunting field, for all the comedy of poor horsemanship, negotiates the concert of rural and lower classes with aristocracy. Du Maurier’s drawing rooms seek to smooth out or contain social irritants. Tenniel, above all, never strays from the criteria of established (if contentious) parliamentary and governmental debate. Political opposition in Punch, as in the two-party parliament, seeks the middle ground, while conveniently ignoring the dangerous classes at home. But the dangerous man abroad was another matter.

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Doyle: The Rise of Louis Napoleon The ascent of a new pretender, Louis Napoleon, aided by Revolution and Second Republic, was experienced in Britain as a real threat already by October 1848 when he ran for the presidency. In the fall, Doyle treated Liberty’s Vision of Louis Napoleon’s Entry into Paris (p. 104) as lightly and as crudely as in the Bayeux Tapestry parody; but this time, the strip runs continuously, at speed as it were, merging scenes. The pseudo-medieval style and archaic spelling of the inscriptions might posit the designs as contenders for the Palace of Westminster murals; but implicit here is a more sinister message: the intrusion, if not invasion of another usurper into French politics, an ill omen for all. The fifteen quatrains of verses on the page preceding and commenting on the cut summon up an extensive panorama of Napoleonic terror, those known from the past and those threatening in the future, in a prescience beyond the imaginations of most French people, who proved largely passive to or beguiled by the rhetoric of the prince-president-to-be. “Once more before his slavish work I [Liberty] seem to hold a blind, / Again light up false beacons for that wrecker of mankind . . .” The envoi to Doyle’s strip in the last stanza hopes the nephew is more word than the uncle’s deed: “So is the Buonaparte of word to the Buonaparte of deed— / He that rides there, to him that sleeps within the Invalides!” Doyle’s Liberty’s Vision starts with the miserable “eagle”: in reality a captive or stuffed creature intended to raise a Bonapartist revolt against the regime. For Daumier the idea was preposterous. The creature is now brought to the Place Vendôme to adorn the Napoleonic column. This is followed by the rallying of the army and garde mobile, who are in turn joined by citizens shouting patriotic slogans. Promises of “Lyberte” are so much straw, as in the puppet figure of “Guido” (i.e., British Catholic terrorist Guy Fawkes, who in the “Gunpowder Plot” of

1606 sought to blow up the Houses of Parliament), jointly carried forth by citizen and soldier. This famous plot raises the terrible possibility: could the new French Republican government be blown up, destroyed by the new Napoleonic Guy Fawkes? So it happened, and not without some gunpowder. The next vignette has French republicans abasing themselves before the Napoleonic code, while the people-geese who would soon elect him president by a massive majority stupidly quack Vive l’Empereur. They are dazzled and hoodwinked by promises of La Gloire, incarnated as a devil with bloody dagger and flaming torch, before whom all is again military humiliation, especially on the part of the decrepit Ye Old Guarde in force. Meanwhile Communists and Socialists strut, arm in arm, picking pockets. This small, devilish anti-Napoleonic minority was anathema to Punch and the bourgeoisie on both sides of the channel. Not so “Freedom of Ye Press,” which is chained, gagged, and arrested at saber-point (premonition of even more savage legislation to come), in advance of the much-constrained plebiscite of early December 1848, which shut down the Charivari for a few days. The plebiscite was known to have been bought by mass bribes represented here by the decorations showered upon greedy, applauding crowds of people carrying banners inscribed “Vive l’Empereur,” some ass-headed and pulling the triumphal chariot bearing the (future) emperor, which crushes his opponents. The violence accompanying the plebiscites was personified in the Daumier lithograph and sculpture of the villainous thug Ratapoil. The vision concludes with a vignette of the Devil-Future sitting contemptuously atop a (Napoleonic) pyramid, observing the glory of a poodle-army, and the destruction of free journalism. All this was strong stuff for Punch. The British press was in a better position than its French counterparts to denounce the censorship in France. The French censorship could barely be protested let alone defied, and could literally (as

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Punch shows) barricade and lock the doors of newspapers so that “not a murmur is raised to inveigh against the slaughter” (1849, v. XV, p. 178). Not quite true: Nadar, caricaturist, future photographer and balloonist, founded his Revue Comique (November 1848–December 1849) as an attack on the president of the Republic, running a story called the “Public and Private Life of Mossieu Réac” (i.e., Mr Reactionary). With its 148 drawings and innumerable twists of fate, this comic strip becomes virtually a Töpfferian graphic novel, although Nadar never risked publishing it as an album.9 The Réac of the editor-artist’s creation, like the Frankenstein monster, turns against his creator in the form of a censorship that drives him to suicide. This is all the more bitterly ironic, in that both Revolutions, of July 1830 and February 1848, were made by and on behalf of a free press, British style. Punch laments the broad complicity with repression on the part of the French people. In the big cut in the next issue (v. XV, p. 184) Doyle shows The Judgment of Paris, with a pretty young (female) Paris giving the apple of the presidency to Louis Napoleon, in preference over the presidential aspirations of poet-journalist Lamartine and General Cavaignac. For Punch, France was always in the news. Toward the end of 1848, most of the big cuts, which Doyle shared with Leech, are about French politics; the closest to visual narrative is Doyle’s septet on The Seven Ages of the Republic (p. 105), which, now in a more realistic style, gives an amusing parody of famous lines from Shakespeare: “First, Young France / émeuting and plotting, e’en in the nurse’s arms”; then the ouvrier creeping like snail unwillingly to school (of revolutionary Louis Blanc); then Lamartine “inditing a sonnets to Liberty’s eyebrow”; then “The garde mobile seeking the bubble reputation in the cannon’s mouth”; then despotic Cavaignac (as Justice) “with eyes severe and beard of formal [i.e., Algerian-campaign] cut.” The sixth age shows “the lean and slippered pantaloon (of Liberty) with Constitution weak, halting twixt Anarchy and Despotism . . . who pipes Louis

Napoleon in.” The last scene “is second childishness, and mere oblivion, sans trade, sans tin (money), sans press, sans everything.”10 The emaciated, sick Republic is left at the mercies of quarreling doctors Lamartine, Cavaignac, and Louis Napoleon, whose only remedy is a heavy dose of “Idées Napolienne” (sic). At year’s end of Punch’s continuous barrage against the new ruler of France, a pathetic, liberty-coiffed damsel stares into the abyss of a huge Napoleonic hat, over the title “The Young Republic of France contemplating suicide.” In Punch’s final issue of 1848, Doyle himself terminates the year with recognition that the now-definitive president of the Republic demanded a closer look at his earlier life, over the Hogarthian title, The President’s Progress; or, the Life and Adventures of Prince Louis Napoléon (p. 106). This was very basic biography, rendering more realistically and in a continuous (unboxed) flow of narrative, the high points of the prince’s adventures familiar to the English public from his own propaganda. The figure fencing refers to his education in a Swiss military school, “Eglington Tournament” to that strange revival in 1839 of a medieval jousting tournament (literally washed out by rain) in which many British aristocrats, as well as our princely Frenchman in exile, engaged. (Doyle had illustrated this in extenso as a child, in 1840.) Doyle then shows the prince rousing a local army unit in the notorious attempted coup in 1840 centered on Boulogne, during which, trying to escape to England, and clutching eagle and Napoleonic hat, he is arrested. Louis Napoleon’s long sojourn in jail at the fortress of Ham, 1840–1846, was in reality a relatively comfortable and less spartan abode than is indicated in the drawing. His confinement allowed him to eat well, stay healthy, read, see friends, and dream of escape (as we see him doing here). It was a kind of house arrest, the French then treating even their most dangerous political opponents with more civility than most governments can manage today. The truly prison-like view, with its barred window and damp stone floor and walls, is enlarged by Doyle in

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the Ups and Downs of Political Life (p. 107), the better to contrast his predicament with that of his jailor at the time, King Louis-Philippe enthroned in majesty; and then to contrast him in turn as president of the Republic, with the king ousted and an exile on his behalf. Louis Napoleon’s escape is meticulously planned, and executed in dramatic, romantic fashion. As shown, he flees the Ham fortress-prison dressed as a laborer carrying a beam of wood. Fast forward to his subsequent and recent massive victory over French public opinion. The figures given in the design show a suspicious exactitude, with no mention of their source, which may imply heavy manipulation in the electioneering. The victory is theatrically exaggerated, with citizens falling over themselves in abject devotion to the victor, now a huge figure enthroned. All the commotion across the channel contrasts with the placidity of No Place Like Home (p. 108) where, over the New Year celebrations, the Briton, a fat and porcine paterfamilias adorned with a mindless smile, sits enthroned under a portrait of the queen and over his nine children, most of them studiously occupied. The patriarch’s smug satisfaction seems to derive from his reading about a State of Europe to which he is happily immune. The murderous violence swirling around the portly Briton is mainly French: armies cannonade towns and storm barricades including one defended by crudely armed Socialists. Their leader Proudhon brandishes a flag declaring Property is Theft, and a female holds a banner labeled Rights of Women. Hysterical rebels terrify Catholic priests (this a personal touch of Catholic Doyle’s), crowns are kicked like footballs, and the French masses adore the new Napoleonic boots and hat. In this (unusual) double-page centerspread, the marginalia of violence are now rendered in a nonmedieval, though still sketch-like style, and with a certain irony. British domestic self-satisfaction is graphically exposed and real, while the foreign border scenes flicker into a distant frontier of consciousness. Fortress Britain.

Hogarth Parodies If the paterfamilias in No Place Like Home looks so self-satisfied and well fed, he might have just returned from the Lord Mayor’s banquet as rendered by Doyle some weeks previously. In the long list of luminaries parodied by Punch, William Hogarth occupies a special place. Unobtrusively, and without crediting the master, Doyle (still in his medievalizing style) adapts the eighth scene of Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747), which lampoons the greed exhibited at the Sheriff ’s banquet. Doyle adds a detail not in the Hogarth original: a group of overburdened waiters serving live turtles (Fig. 3-10). The context and implication are critical: wasteful celebration such as this ignores the national need for reform. Likewise Leech (a few months later, in April 1849) raises concerns over taxation and reform at home with a parody of the second scene of Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode (1845, original oil painting of the series then on view in the National Gallery), under the explicitly Hogarthian title The Political Marriage à la Mode (Fig. 3-11). For Hogarth’s mercenary, mismatched marriage between impoverished high aristocracy and moneyed commoner, Leech substitutes the mismatch or forced marriage of convenience between aristocratic, dissolute government and corrupt ministerial place-holders (“Place” is held by the dog, left, for the dog in Hogarth which sniffs out his master’s sexual misdeeds.) To the right, “Financial Reform” is represented by the steward financially responsible to Hogarth’s viscount (and here to parliamentary pressure), a figure dejected because ignored, as in Hogarth. This was a theme of other cartoons at the time, running parallel with and connected to the continuous hostility to the prince-president and his militarism, which obliged the British to renew spending on defense instead of urgent financial reform. For Hogarth’s viscountess in the center, whose attitude even in Hogarth’s own time generat-

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Fig. 3-10. richard doyle, “an humble attempt to Portraye Ye Pageante of Ye ryghte worshipful Ye lord Mayor hys Show. to which is added his dynnere,” Punch, v. xv, (november) 1848, p. 203.

Fig. 3-11. John leech, “the Political Marriage à la mode,” Punch, v. xvi, (May) 1849, p. 181.

ed widely different interpretations, Leech brings forth a Britannia with trident and shield, wearing an indeterminate look, where Hogarth’s character displays what has been seen as a curious smile—of enticement? In the Leech parody, with her raised trident in one hand and the other held in a closed

fist, Britannia is probably intended to seem threatening, as if angered by the failure to enact the much-needed reforms. The idleness of the family (i.e., national) servant, emphasized in Hogarth, is sketched lightly in the disorderly background. “We’re a’ noddin,” written where Hogarth has music

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Fig. 3-12. John leech, “Scene from ‘the President’s Progress.’ (Suggested by hogarth.),” Punch, v. 22, (January) 1852, p. 37.

sheets on the chair in the foreground, is cited from a Robert Burns folksong (still current), called “The Nodding Song,” the words “we’re a’ noddin” repeated in title and chorus, about somnolence, dissipation, and intemperance, of which the then British government stands accused. Hogarth links us forward to January 1852, just after the prince-president had declared himself emperor, in another parody by Leech, Scene from ‘The President’s Progress.’ (Suggested by Hogarth) (Fig. 3-12), the same title used previously for the narrative of Louis Napoleon’s meteoric ascent. This time it is The Rake’s Progress, after the original painting in the Sir John Soane Museum, where it still hangs today, which is parodied from the first scene of the rake coming into his inheritance. The rake is now the new emperor-to-be, recently installed by a well-oiled plebiscite, holding out a cash bribe to France in the role of Hogarth’s dishonored Sarah. In the Hogarth she is the Rake’s pregnant mistress showing a wedding ring, but here she wears a cap labeled Liberty. Rakish Napoleon is measured for

the imperial purple (lying in a roll to the right) by his minister for war Armand de Saint-Arnaud, while a cleric (Jesuit?) steals some of his money. Significant detail as in Hogarth abounds: Imperial and military regalia lie scattered around, armor, crowns, orb, stellar decorations, bayonets flying a Code Napoleon and emblazoned on a shield, rifles and bedraggled eagle in or near the cupboard to the right. Above all, a large picture of the first Napoleon reviewing his army hangs over the fireplace in which stands an imperial throne, embroidered with a conspicuous “N.” Faggots for a real fire (of liberty?) are removed. In the foreground, a very Hogarthian visual pun to amuse the connoisseur: a hand on a wooden stick (as used to applaud from a crowd?) appears to cock a snook (thumb its nose) from a small bust of the first emperor. This cartoon in particular offended the French historian of English caricature, Augustin Filon, who after describing it in his chapter on Leech, calls it “insulting, coming after the emperor had been accepted in France and Europe.”11

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Fig. 3-13. watts Phillips?, “Marriage à-la-mode,” Diogenes, no. 120, 1855.

Our third Hogarth parody, by Matthew Sears and Watts Phillips, appears in an 1855 issue of Diogenes (Fig. 3-13), a journal less respectful than Punch of patriotic authority; this parody reprises the second scene of Hogarth’s Marriage à-la-mode, with Diogenes himself as the distraught steward, holding a whole raft of reform papers labeled Bills Postponed, Reform Bill, Education, Sanitary—and, of particular concern to a magazine, of course, Paper Duty. But the major culprit lies spread out on papers lying under the feet of a miserable-looking, portly John Bull figure, inscribed Expenses of the War, and (very large) Plan of Sebastopol. The year is now 1855. The war is the Crimean war, then in its second year. The moment is in the middle of the endless, bitter, bloody, and interminable Siege of Sebastopol. The role of Hogarth’s enigmatic countess is taken by a figure attractive as in the Hogarth original, turreted like a city, labeled La France. Her expression, with eyes rolled up, is I believe that of helplessness. Hogarth’s unfortunate social mésalliance is now the misconceived Anglo-

French alliance, both parties in lamentable condition: British revelation of the patent mismanagement and wastefulness of material resources and manpower (not to speak of womanpower), and the French grief-stricken with their loss of life. Punch itself, less obviously, will join in the critique, which had been led by famous reportage of The Times.

Doyle: Manners and Customs: Toward the True Social Comic Strip We have visited some of Doyle’s big political cuts, as such more or less dictated to him by editorial decree, customarily, as thrashed out collectively at the famous Wednesday dinner attended by editors and regular contributors. The venue was known as “The Punch Table,” to which it was a rare honor for a stranger to be admitted. It mixed pleasure with business—the pleasure over the eating and (especially) drinking often riotous, followed by serious discussion about the weekly big cut, due for publi-

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Fig. 3-14. richard doyle, “Manners and customs of Ye englyshe in 1849. no. 1. a cydere cellare durying a comyck Songe,” Punch, v. xvi, (March) 1849, p. 114.

cation the following Saturday. This procedure suited the nonpolitical Doyle, and would be followed by his successor John Tenniel, more politically savvy but also bound to the Wednesday editorial consensus. If the Table stipulated or agreed that Doyle devise narrative strips rather than bigger cartoons for the purpose, it was in recognition of his skill in the small-scale vignette. Doyle was above all a social animal. He had much practice in the privileged assignment of scribbling (as it seemed) his random thoughts in miniature about the topical events of the year in the annual almanacks, with their comic marginalia surrounding a centerpiece of text, as in medieval manuscripts. The idea if not the arrangement was similar to Charivari’s periodic miscellanies by Cham, known as the Revue du mois (or de la semaine, or de l’année). The almanack for 1848 (Fig. 3-7), where Doyle’s decorations are arranged on six pages corresponding to two months for each page, offers a prelude to what would become a favorite theme for Punch, as in France: travel. Travel here looks ahead, im-

perially, worldwide. Doyle’s almanack for 1850, his last, shows Tourists Upon the Continent in the Year of Revolution (1849), which adumbrates the troubles encountered by his trio of characters Smith, Brown, and Robinson as correspondents or tourists on a continent run by police states. We must return to these charming (when not alarming) whimsical little vignettes, when they are given novel-like coherence (p. 139). The almanacks’ marginalia trained Doyle in what would prove graphically his forte: topical social description. For Doyle, the Californian Gold Rush of 1849 impelled by the foolish dream of instant wealth was natural fodder, to be overlaid by the discovery of a gold mine of homegrown British humor. A systematic domestic social panorama was now to bring him celebrity, while his early political work was forgotten. The artist first becomes a prized leading actor on the stage of Punch, and enters the annals of cartoon or caricature in a popular series called Manners and Customs of the Englyshe (Figs. 3-14 and 3-15). The regularity of its appearance, modeled on the idea of the series on a single theme, as maintained over the

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Fig. 3-15. richard doyle, “Manners and customs of the englyshe in 1849,” Smythfield cattle Markete, Punch, v. xvi, (april) 1849, p. 154.

long term in the Charivari, was distributed pell-mell in forty-one more or less weekly installments from March to December of 1849, thus overlapping with Doyle’s political work, and probably more attractive to him. The series was reissued in 1911 and again in 1948. It was continued in Punch in a New Series of ten installments February to June 1850. Here was Britain, or London at least, enjoying itself quietly or not, but always peacefully, against the unnerving rumbling of the continent. The timing of this harmonious celebration of Britons at peace, of the childish innocence of their commonplace social amusements cannot be considered coincidental, nor can the novelty of Doyle relying on abbreviated outlines in his drawings, the familiar medievalizing style, connoting simplicity, for which he was known—virtually stick figures. The Doyle series may have prompted Leech to solidify his own social mix, and lend more continuity to the new genre. With an eye toward the success of

Doyle’s rather humdrum Manners and Customs, Leech introduced in the midst of them his first picture story, The Pleasures of Housekeeping (pp. 207–12). This visually far more appealing and coherent narrative is personified in a gentleman, Mr. Briggs, who would become a popular fixture. In our present context it stands forth as virtually a critique of the all-too-predictable Doyle. Today Manners and Customs may be valued as social documentation, and for its understated style. Taking, at random, the first of Doyle’s series (Fig. 3-14), we see a cider cellar filled with a disconsolate audience not much enjoying the comic songs. The very ordinariness of composition and lack of dramatic incident typical of the whole series offered a curious change from Doyle’s mainstream comic style, which was fanciful, quirky, inventive, ever mobile. Some of the amusements are downright dangerous, like the Steeple Chase, and the Smithfield Cattle Market (Fig. 3-15).

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Doyle’s Manners were intended to be read in conjunction with a short text feature on the same page called Mr Pips his Diary. This riffed on a day in the life of a typical London gadabout, more respectably than with degenerate predecessors like Tom and Jerry, or the sexually indiscreet original Mr Pepys. Mr Pips (Pepys is pronounced Peeps) was written by Punch senior editor Percival Leigh in the laconic manner of the famous Diary. His contribution would be included in later collected editions of the Manners and Customs. Doyle’s flow of London life, more bourgeois than bawdy, is to the mid-Victorian age what Life in London was to the Regency era. There was a follow-up called Bird’s Eye View of Society, an album of 1864, in sixteen new, much larger scenes by Doyle, with (unpepysian) commentary by Thackeray. The Manners and Customs, which seems so English, had its effect on French caricature: a sample was copied in L’Illustration, and the weekly Journal pour Rire took up the concept, format, spirit, and outline design (“dessin au trait”) of Doyle’s series. This became a regular feature in France maintained by the young Gustave Doré, and (as a long aftermath in French caricature showed) was considered especially suited to the naiveté of scenes of French peasant life, the equivalent of Doyle’s urban life.12 The superficial chronology driving Doyle’s calendar of otherwise disconnected social amusements is partly year-round generic, and partly topical-seasonal (e.g., Chiswick Flower Show in July, Guy Fawkes in November). This made it low maintenance, but I like to imagine Leech looking and thinking: why not more structure and coherence, more continuity and personalization with named protagonists? And was Doyle himself not encouraged by editors, or even by the example of Leech, himself embarked on a narrative, to exchange for his miscellanies of jostling crowds in a half page design, a series of smaller and connected vignettes filling a whole page? There was now, with Doyle and Leech, to be a unifying dynamic, a series of

sequential actions in episodes constituting funny mini-adventures or misadventures, to replace the static assemblage of undifferentiated figures. Our long preamble with the Manners brings us to the new central format whose origins we trace: the narrative (social) comic strip, which would moreover eventually bring Doyle to a real graphic novel.

Pleasure Trips of Brown, Jones and Robinson No stranger to narrative as such, hitherto Doyle had as we have seen toyed with loosely structured, moreor-less historical fact-based political scenarios, on content possibly suggested or dictated to him. He now dropped the faux-archaic English spelling of the Barry-eux Tapestry parody retained by the Manners and Customs, together with his characteristic outline style, and set realistic characters in motion. As France was watching the English (borrowing from The Man in the Moon, as well as Doyle), were not the English—Doyle and then Leech—sharpening their gaze upon the French? No doubt they were eyeing the pervasive, proliferating Cham riding high in more than the Charivari.13 In early July 1850 (continuing until November that year), Doyle began his “breakthrough” Pleasure Trips of Brown, Jones, and Robinson (pp. 130–38, ten parts). These gentlemen, evidently a trio of lower-middle-class “everymen” with their commonplace names, are slightly differentiated in character, but united in their readiness to engage actively, albeit clumsily, in a calendar of social and sporting activities not unlike those we saw in Manners and Customs, but narrativized. These are spread over ten installments (cut short in Punch as we shall see), which visit five different local events, with extensions into two and three episodes. Break-through, and break-down: the vignettes are arranged unboxed in a regular manner, from six to ten to a

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whole page, which would become the classic form for the genre. The action throughout the series is in its way fairly realistic—very English, predictable, commonplace, the accidents foreseeable. Generally speaking, the gentle Doyle is, as one would expect, more humorous than farcical in the French manner although in the visit to Epsom I, the vignettes of the coach overturning and overturned could not be bettered, à la Pickwick if not Cham. The trio start with that most English of obsessions: horseracing. The trip to Epsom (in two parts) involves the hazards of travel, natural perhaps and much enhanced: the overcrowded horse-drawn coach, the scattering of provisions, trees about to decapitate passengers riding on top, all being pitched into a stream. In situ at the racetrack, commonplace misfortunes follow: Brown, cheated at the “thimble-rig” trick (five pounds was a lot of money), is followed by a series of humiliations: being marched off the racetrack, an invitation to a bout of pugilism, a visit to the fortune-teller, an encounter with the pickpocket, losing at rouge et noir, Robinson falling off a carriage, Brown’s failure to find the horse he rode in on and left abandoned at the end. Similar incidents can be found in William Powell Frith’s hugely popular painting Derby Day (1858), a touchstone, like Doyle’s series, of the new realism. An (untitled) episode about the military review undertaken by the aged Duke of Wellington involves a collapsing spectator stand (then as now), the trio being run over by the cavalry, seeing nothing, and finally being caught and exposed in a military square, another great humiliation. In the zoo a series of exotic animals allow for benign interactions—bear, stork, parrot, camel, elephant, and best of all, a hippopotamus—a species first seen in London May 1850, here annoyingly supine but a star attraction: in a separate cartoon the beast is shown being stupidly hoisted on a balloon.14 Next, The Ball (a human zoo?), running to two parts in one issue, requires some preparation, and a degree of very mild amorous rivalry and in-

trigue. Jones, inexplicably but insultingly struck on the back by a “heavy dragoon,” finds himself having to challenge him to a duel, which bridges into another installment two weeks later, with terror, reprieve, and arrest. (Unlike in France, dueling was illegal in Britain.) Things are warming for the trio. What next? A disappointment. After a three-week hiatus, there appeared the last (no. 10 of the New Series) of Doyle’s Manners and Customs, a composition eliciting, significantly, boredom in the audience hearing a lecture on prehistoric skeletons. The eighth episode of Brown Jones and Robinson, The Riding-School, offered at least some action. All is clumsiness and insecurity, culminating in a somersault over a hurdle. No surprises there: a new stimulus was needed now—travel abroad. At this point Doyle may have remembered his marginalia in the Almanack for 1850 illustrating the perils of foreign travel (p. 139). There, he had warned tourists to expect among the medley of continental nuisances the real danger of entanglement in revolutionary barricades, arrest, and rough interrogation. The change in narrative track must have been motivated by a recent holiday abroad, probably in Germany. For the trio’s trip abroad, Up the Rhine, Brown amasses a huge amount of equipment, while Jones manages with just one bag, and all are sick on the steamer crossing to Ostende. Sleeping rough, snoring, perilous disembarkation, passport control—mild enough so far as tourist discomfort goes, and the budding adventure is suspended at Ostende. Bigger adventures and dangers would have to wait. The progress, not just of Doyle’s tourists, but also of their chronicler’s very life, was interrupted by an all-too-real political invasion from the continent: the so-called papal aggression. Thackeray, who would have his own cause for leaving Punch—its hostility to Louis Napoleon—tells us succinctly what happened with Doyle: “At the time of the papal aggression Mr Punch was prodigiously angry; and one of the chief misfortunes which happened to him at that time was that through the violent opinions he

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Westminster. Punch thus culminated a long-standing, ongoing anti-Catholic campaign, and its hostility to the recent nomination of Cardinal Wiseman to the supreme Catholic office in Britain was the last straw (such as the one protruding from the puppet Guy Fawkes’s collar) that broke the back of Catholic Doyle’s tolerance. The next big cut by Leech, just preceding the second part of Up the Rhine showed the pope using this new archbishopric as the thin end of the burglar’s jimmy (i.e., wedge) to break into the Anglican church.

Exit Doyle, Enter Tenniel

Fig. 3-16. John leech, “the guy Fawkes of 1850 preparing to blow up all england!” Punch, v. xix, (november) 1850, p. 197.

expressed regarding the Roman Catholic hierarchy, he lost the invaluable services, the graceful pencil, the harmless wit, the charming fancy of Mr Doyle.”15 A promising travel story was cut short, and the artist’s lively career on Punch truncated. Blame Punch, or the pope, or Doyle himself?? Whatever the case, Doyle’s career suffered: it would never again be so busy, so fulfilling and so international, reaching wherever Punch reached. Right opposite the start of Up the Rhine there was printed a big cut by Leech of The Guy Fawkes of 1850 “preparing to blow up all England!” published early November, for the anniversary of Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot (Fig. 3-16). The pope (Pio Nono, Pius IX), determined to introduce a full Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy into England such as had been unknown since the age of Henry VIII, is shown crowning the combustible pyre of Catholic bishoprics with the miter of the Archbishop of

The campaign continued intensively well into the next year, with a Puseyism (a Catholicizing movement within the Anglican church) alternating with real Catholicism as the favorite enemy, which made it impossible for Doyle to return after he resigned. He could, if still a Punch reader himself, have seen “Pilgrims to Rome,” a parody of the famous prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, printed June 1851 with a design by the replacement of one deemed by many irreplaceable, incoming John Tenniel. The parading pilgrims are labeled arrogance, feudalism, conceit, odium theologicum, vanity, coquetry, etc. They are accompanied by extensive, ingeniously parodic verses which start, “Whanne that ye firste of April breedeth jokès / On boys and girles and simple full-grown folkès, / To seken out what they mote never findè / Legs from the lame, and eyesighte from the blindè . . .” It is curious to see Tenniel evolving his own, cleanly contoured, classical-allegorical style out of the outline designs established by his predecessor, and taking over seamlessly not only the big cut but also decorations for the Almanack and elsewhere, deft marginalia and miniature vignettes with a whiff of Doyle’s medievalizing. Tenniel will settle into his flexible mature style, employing the quirky as well as the monumental, in linear effects simultaneously

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and alternatively contoured and shaded. In the big cut, the unchanging workhorse John Leech begins retrospectively to look tired and graphically drab. Doyle, who went on to establish his domain in fairy-tale land, may have sacrificed Punch but he did not abandon his ambition to send his trio of tourists on a continental tour. He took advantage of his freedom to expand their initiation in Punch into an independent venture, printed a few years later by the Punch publisher Bradbury and Evans, who must have regretted Doyle’s departure as much as everyone else. Under the title The Foreign Tour of Brown, Jones and Robinson, the new enterprise became a true graphic novel, reaching an unheard-of length of 172 drawings on eighty pages—surely a far greater continuity than Punch could have countenanced. Doyle never repeated this attempt to write and draw his own story, and while the experiment has its amusing moments, the comedy is not sustained either graphically or in the inflated, verbose captions. The Foreign Tour takes its historic place not only as Britain’s first graphic novel, in its extent looking ahead to the twentieth century, but also as a primary document of tourism in mid-century. (So as not to interrupt the larger flow of our Punch biography here, I consign further comment, and some sample illustrations, to pp. 140–56). The grand designs by Tenniel, replacing staff artists Doyle and Leech in the new-style prestigious and much improved big cut cartoon, offer a kind of school of history painting otherwise lacking in Britain. This is Punch’s contribution to the art of the era, ignored by art history, but certainly more regarded at the time than any real, painted competitors it may have had. Tenniel’s graphic monument to the Great Exhibition was patriotic and respectful, consonant with Punch’s running commentary on its planning, execution, and fruition. The great event was on everyone’s agenda. Would Doyle have offered a comic strip on it? As it is, we have, in that genre, only the xenophobic, philistine vision of some pro-

vincial bourgeois visitors, from an Onwhyn “roller picture” (Pls. 8-1-1 through 8-1-6). Onwhyn’s visiting family are imagined, in a manner inconceivable in Punch, as simply disgusted with the discomforts and vulgarity of it all. Striving for variety, Punch brought in new series, such as Tenniel’s Punch’s Anniversaries with parodies of history paintings, continued Leech’s hardy Flunkeyana, and initiated his Servantgalism (both long running from 1853). Leech’s Bloomerism proved a useful tool to ridicule uppity women and women’s rights, a campaign paralleled if not touched by Daumier’s Bas Bleus. To the lingering campaign against Catholicism, Punch added a renewal of anti-Napoleonic (III) cartoons, which continued vehemently into 1852–1853, complete with another (mock?) invasion scare; in the last days of 1851 Punch sees the newly declared emperor as “A beggar on horseback, the Brummagem Bonaparte,” riding over a prostrate France on his way to Glory, armed with a bloody sword at the edge of an abyss. With Tenniel, Punch pulls out all the stops: Louis Napoleon is the brutal Bluebeard, murderer of Press and Liberty; he is Hogarth’s Rake, as noted above, a Frankenstein monster, the eaglet with tiny wings, arch-traitor, sworn tyrant, with bullets not diamonds in his new diadem, increasing armaments to make peace . . . The invasion scare of the early 1850s outlasted its backbone, the aged but ever watchful, nervous Duke of Wellington, complaining of the “danger of war” and the “defenseless state of our coasts.” 16 Cartoons and articles in Punch made play with this and the demand for an effective militia. Trust Cham for a joke on this: Just before Wellington died in 1852 Cham in France cast himself, in a pseudo-autobiographical comic strip, as personally and absurdly suspected by the duke of planning in person a single-handed invasion of England.17 But the feared invasion proved itself to be not of the French, but the Russians—threatening British India. The East India Company’s corrupt administration was subject in Punch to an extended satirical critique, accom-

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panied by Tenniel’s only comic strip (pp. 257–58), about the great British pastime, wild beast hunting in Bengal. The improbable exploits of a neophyte civilian hunter called Peter Piper are recounted in a mix of mockery and admiration. The context and close proximity of the militia cartoons suggest Peter Piper would have been more useful staying home and joining the militia.

Tenniel and the Indian Hunt Brought in to replace Doyle, comparisons were inevitable. Tenniel could not possibly match Doyle’s quirky style, but was insurpassable when it came to the big political cut, which demanded dignity. They were not exactly rivals, but Doyle had his own way of contrasting their approaches to the cartoon, holding his own self-parodic “Medieval-AngelicoPugin-Gothic, or flat style” against a parody of the grand manner of the “Fuseli-Michael-Angelesque school,” implicitly Tenniel’s, which the latter would adapt for his political cuts, sometimes with a certain brutality. Political cartoons demanded above all physical energy, which together with his expertise in drawing animals, Tenniel was able to bring to his one serious attempt with the comic strip. The context for this unique venture which we analyze in some detail below (see chapter 9) is decidedly topical and political. The dangers perceived to be facing British India were real, hence the need for the renewal of militia training. The problem with India was not only the Russian threat at a time when the Crimean war was looming. There were real abuses internal to the British administration, which had long been entrusted to the nominally private East India Company. Tenniel’s civilian hunter Peter Piper, overcoming, more by luck than skill, a series of wild beasts, may be seen as putting a band-aid on the sores of long-standing British maladministration in the restive subcontinent.

Readers of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair would have imbibed a very hostile but commonplace view of an English civil servant in India, typified (or caricatured) in the character Josh Sedley. Rapidly enriched in his youth in Bengal as Collector of Boggley Wollah, Sedley is portrayed as vain, corrupt, rapacious, stupid, lazy, drunken, selfish, cowardly, and tyrannical—and a liar capable of telling stories about seeing a tiger pulling his mahout off an elephant, as happens in Tenniel’s strip. Even a presumably enlightened figure like the Duke of Wellington, in some ways sympathetic to the native population and their customs, found them “the most mischievous, deceitful race of people [he had] ever seen or read of.”18 Much is made of Sedley’s being fat like Peter Piper; in Tenniel, the Indian servants of the hunt are all thin, likely due to the British tactic of hoarding grain and causing widespread famine—their thinness a clear manifestation of economic exploitation. Peter Piper’s hunting exploit symbolically shows the Indian servants in their military capacities as essential auxiliaries in the British army; but their “deceitfulness” would be demonstrated in the many minor rebellions leading, a few years after Tenniel’s strip was published, to the great Rebellion of 1857 (aka The Indian Mutiny). The administration of the East India Company was known to be inefficient, expensive, and corrupt. It so happens—by no coincidence—that on the page exactly preceding (i.e., front side of the same leaf), the third in the series of Peter Piper’s safaris, there appeared a damning view headed “Our Indian Commission” (1853, v. XXIV, p. 139, sequel p. 177), itself on the same page as some text mocking “The Coronation of Napoleon” and his need for a special imperial crown. Accompanying “Our Indian Commission No. 2” on the same page, there appear verses deploring the income tax necessitated by the expense of maintaining the Indian colony, and printed between the third and fourth Peter Piper series.

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Our Indian Commission the “indian commission” takes the form of a series of letters from British officials in india supposedly solicited by Punch to correct the “very imperfect information” given to the government in london. invented of course, and satirical in their way, the letters are self-revealing of bitter truths about corruption in this major part of the empire, run at this time not directly from whitehall, but by the technically private east india company. the consensus of the texts excerpted shows just how exploitative and ignorant is the governance of india. all this is a foil to tenniel’s comic graphics with their rosy picture of collaboration between an incompetent civilian amateur hunter and the native auxiliaries, who are, per tenniel, more or less devoted and essential to the safety of the hero Peter Piper. this was the view, too, of the various hunting manuals available to the artist. First witness: Major larkspur reports how he went to the Magistrate of a cutcherry, or court, to ask for the loan of an elephant and (native) men with which to beat the jungle, for a shooting expedition. in so doing he doubted that the people were oppressed; if so, it was no more than they deserved, since they were all infernal liars. the court of directors were themselves an unpleasant lot, infamous administrators who, according to captain Stifflip, deserved to be hanged. reforms were to be sure needed, in the roads and the climate. the leading civilians were snobs and corrupt and should not be allowed to wear mustaches. the sepoys (native troops) were treated with absurd indulgence and were cowards. By contrast, sixty-seven-year-old colonel Mangosteen, fifty-six years in india, prefers india to england—for its climate. the Bengal army, backed by sepoys, is the best in the world. Mangosteen “has the highest opinion of the people of india who make excellent servants and allow you to thrash and abuse them without resisting.” Building railways is pointless because (indian) guards would steal the rails. More, some weeks later: Mr limpley, in charge of salt and opium among other high offices, grossly underpaid on a £1,000 per annum retirement pension, had suffered ridiculous and disproven accusations of bribery. native opinion is worthless as is the idea of liberty of the press, or any kind of reform, or a code of laws. Major-general Bumbleby finds the condition of the people of india excellent, in contrast to the fat and lazy baboons in calcutta. it is a mistake to criticize governance of india back home, and an evil slander that such a high-minded, disinterested body as the court of directors are guilty of selling appointments. the “interlopers” (i.e., the civilians) are a damnable lot.

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especially in barbaric Ireland, had by now worn very thin. By July 1853, the rupture with Russia was complete; there was really dangerous human game to hunt. Britain mobilized its militia, ostracized the Peace Society, and cosied up to Emperor Napoleon and the French generally, who were in Punch shown welcoming The Tourist in Paris in an extended text series. There was even a Punch-Charivari entente cordiale: In a café at the Palais Royal, the garçon, in a gesture of friendship toward a member of the allied nation, enthusiastically offers a copy of “Le Charivari—French—a Punch” with other pleasantries in broken English (Fig. 3-17). The year 1854 was dominated by the war, and public opinion urged the unleashing of the raging British lion against the menacing Russian bear.

Crimean War

Fig. 3-17. John leech, “Scene – Palais royal,” French waiter and london gent, Punch, v. xxvii, (august) 1854, p. 100.

These “commissions,” like Punch with its cartoons generally, must also have been read in India. While the military and big-game addicts might be condescendingly amused by Tenniel’s Peter Piper, the critics, in India and at home, used the “Our India Commission” and like articles as ammunition in their demands for reform. By early July of 1852, Punch could congratulate itself on its influence in Parliament and in India, to the point that by the next year it bore fruit in an Indian imitation called the Hindi Punch, as noted by the British press and Charles Dickens in All the Year Round.19 For Punch the much-abused subservience of the native Indian servant stood in contrast to English society, with its concurrent series mocking the arrogance of servants male (Flunkeyana) and female (Servantgalism). For these insufficiently servile servants no conditions of service are good enough, and attempts to improve themselves (via literacy, piano lessons) preposterous. Punch’s residual sympathies for the lower classes,

Fashion took note, in an endless series of jokes about the military mustache (and beard) movement as adopted from France and pursued by English juveniles and stunted, effeminate civilians. More seriously Punch ridiculed the stupidity and cruelty of the military stock (collar), which tended to the strangulation of the common soldier, but was adopted by dandies. Even more famous was the campaign of The Times, followed by Punch, and much applauded by history since, against the appalling mismanagement of the war, especially on the medical and military equipment sides. The French did much better in these domains, but any criticism in that country was silenced. The official French-British entente cordiale was cemented in the exchange of royal visits during the thick of the war. The fraternal equality of the French and British soldier, recognized by Punch, was quite ignored by its French humorous equivalents, which amid innumerable cartoons never mention the British (equal) contribution to the war at all.

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During the Crimean war, Punch could not insult or disparage the French emperor. It was left to another, more radical satirical magazine, Diogenes, unafraid of offending this essential ally, to lay down a pictorial account of the dismal story of the emperor’s ascent to power. In the circumstances it is no surprise that the ever-patriotic Punch would suspend its traditional campaign against the usurper-now-ally; more surprising is that the radical Diogenes, in its two-year existence (1853–1855) much given to the comic strip, should have risked its circulation by outspoken satire on Louispetit and His Bird (pp. 169–79) run in eleven installments over as many weeks, in June–August 1855, while the 332-day Siege of Sebastopol raged in fearful conditions for the troops of all sides. Like The Times, Punch expresses outrage with domestic official neglect and mismanagement, culminating in the emperor’s grudgingly acknowledged visit to the Queen, April 16–21, 1855. This was shortly before Diogenes started its diatribe against the French ruler. The old story: Reform at home is seen as pushed aside by war abroad. As a conservative reformist publication, Punch calculated the cost of the war (paid for by new income taxes) at more than 80 million pounds, or a tiny fraction more than £323 for each of the 247,000 Russians killed (p. 219). One-tenth of this would have made the peaceable English workmen, with wives and families, happy. The credit for killing all those Russian savages (depicted in Punch as sanguinary barbarians, etc., etc.) does not however go to Britons, but to Generals January and February, armed neutrals who killed impartially both sides. Even this sacrifice did not bring the peace Punch sought whether by negotiation or force. If the latter, let it be by a single blow, such as “the night ascent of a balloon” over Sebastopol, dropping “a huge bale of gun-cotton, or a hog’s head of chloride of nitrogen . . . into place [to] blow the whole garrison to atoms.” Sounds like a small atom bomb avant la lettre. Antiwar Diogenes at this time, in a comic strip, imagines an ingenious

amateur called Popkins building a homemade bomb which causes domestic and urban havoc, in a manner clearly reminiscent of horrible killings of Britons far away (pp. 180–81). The equivalent in Punch at this moment (June 1855) might be the more innocent, but still dangerous feat of Charles Keene’s Mr Popplewit shooting a rook, which ricochets and disfigures him (Pls. 10-3-1 and 10-3-2). He should, according to the rules, have used a crossbow (for more on Keene, see chapter 10). In a rare notice of such an unassuming strip, we find it admired as “an example of intensified fun” by writer William Michael Rossetti in 1861.20 There were two other, quite frivolous comic strips at this time (February to June 1855), Keene’s Mr Spoonbill’s Experiences in the Art of Skating (pp. 283–85), and Leech’s Tom Noddy’s First Day with the Hounds After the Long Frost (pp. 217–20), relief no doubt from the horrors of the Siege of Sebastopol and all the needless sufferings and sacrifices. The Art of Skating later became a convenient metaphor for the administrative skills needed in government and conspicuously lacking in the eras of the Crimean war and the Indian mutiny, when the time finally came to require civil service candidates to pass examinations (Keene, p. 286). The Punch article headed “Queen’s visit to the Crimean Imbeciles” (June 1855, p. 144), which condemned en bloc the official multitude responsible for the Crimean disaster, showed Mr Punch at his punchiest. Punch follows this with a reprise of the hallowed pattern of the folk rigmarole (much used by Cruikshank and others earlier in the century), The House that Jack Built, whereby one thing leads, snowballing, to another, in a comic-strip-style illustration under the title The Steamer that None Stowed (Fig. 3-18). It indicts the ongoing scandal of the failure to deliver essential stores, a negligence for which John Bull nobly “atones by prayer and fast.” In June–July of 1855, at a peak of frustration with the endless war, there began six parts of Rabelais in the Crimea, an appropriately logorrhoeic paro-

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Fig. 3-18. John leech? “the Steamer that none Stowed” (first part), Punch, v. xxviii, (april) 1855, p. 172.

dy of that great French writer’s style, satirizing the English social and political scene. British war administration was all words and no action. The same war, some months before, in late 1854, had inspired Gustave Doré’s self-published Histoire Dramatique, Pittoresque et Caricaturale de la Sainte Russie, by far the biggest comic strip album or graphic novel

of the century.21 The difference in satiric reach is palpable: quite apart from the Punch series being unillustrated, while Doré’s book is packed with hilariously exaggerated images from Russia’s deep history and embellished with Rabelaisian verbiage, we admire the freedom with which Englishmen can attack their own government for mismanagement

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of the war. Doré is concerned only with denigrating the enemy’s history in as ludicrous and sanguinary a manner as possible. It is also testimony to the peculiar sensitivity of the French censorship that Doré should have been obliged, when peace was in the offing (in early 1856), to withdraw his patriotically intended satire from the bookstores, in order not to offend the erstwhile enemy.22 The French were keener to finalize the peace than the British. Tenniel’s La Belle Alliance big cut of September 1, 1855, has a sardonic touch: Empress Eugénie pets a tired-looking lap-lion on her lap, while the British queen feeds the imperial eagle, and Louis Napoleon lights a cigar for Prince Albert. Then the Russian bear is shown trapped, fleeing, or muzzled, and led off by Disraeli. The peace is popular in the way the war, which British command threatened to continue, never was. Rewards are handed out to the high command, up to leading General Mismanagement, and the much-abused common soldier is imagined inspecting the generals.

The relief of the peace was suddenly shattered by the Indian Mutiny (the Sepoy Rebellion), in 1857, the defeat of which was celebrated in a memorable Tenniel centerspread showing the British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal tiger (Fig. 3-19) followed by Justice (Fig. 3-20). These must be classed as of the nastiest and horribly effective cartoons ever published by that magazine. The woman and child just killed by the Bengal tiger, referring to the un-representable (and unimaginable) murder of women and children by the Indian rebels, is supposed to justify the all-too-representable wholesale slaughter of almost naked, unarmed very dark-skinned Indian males by the British soldiers, while Indian women cower behind avenging Justice, pleading for mercy on behalf of their menfolk. In the background corpses rot in the sun, and behind them Indians lying tied to cannon are about to be blown away. This well-documented British military execution was designed to impress native spectators who could get splashed

Fig. 3-19. John tenniel, “the British lion’s vengeance on the Bengal tiger,” Punch, double-page cartoon, august 22, 1857.

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Fig. 3-20. John tenniel, “Justice,” Punch, September 12, 1857.

with blood and hit by body parts. Punch, like much of the press and public, was opposed to all clemency with which the army wanted to assuage the stricken land. “The terrible mutiny . . . had shaken the British power in India to its foundations,” said the famous Times correspondent in the Crimea, William Howard Russell. The genocidal rancor of the British was relayed by Lord Canning to Queen Victoria as a “rabid indiscriminate vindictiveness.”23 From the horrors of the Indian Mutiny which dominated the year, Punch retreated into a plethora of jokes about the ultimate postwar frivolity, one both socially expressive and physically preposterous: the crinoline, which ballooned inexhaustibly all over humorous magazines throughout Europe. After the Crimean war, France receded in the pages of Punch, which ignored great events from France like the Paris World Fair of 1855 and the assassination attempt on the emperor in 1858, while Cham, back in London, devoted no less than ten

issues of the Charivari to the 1862 World’s Fair, the second Great London Exposition. By contrast, Punch offered not a single graphic about the rival Paris Exposition of 1867, only a couple of pages of comic strips recounting the humdrum experiences of Our (French) Artist in Paris, by French-born Eugene Griset (pp. 152–53) in which the exposition is pretext, not focus. We witness only an artist’s difficulties in getting there and his mangling of the French language, plus some tricks for cheap living in a strange city. Part 2 leaves the reader expecting a continuation—which Griset must surely have expected, too.24 He may have been prompted by an interminable series of “Peeps at Paris,” articles run in eighteen installments from March through July, credited to Peeper the Great, Griset’s own graphic “peep” appearing at the very end of the series. Like the comic strip, the “Peeps” rely somewhat on an elementary knowledge of French, making fun with French words and phrases which are spelled out in a gross phonetic and punning way; they also manage to fall short of the “lexgspossessiong,” in favor of an irreverent tour of Parisian sights and institutions, which includes personal visits with the Lumpyraw—a vulgar constellation of letters to impose on an emperor. The verbal nonsense is welcome; a graphic equivalent is lacking, unless it is to be found in the post-Darwin zoological fantasies of Griset and Du Maurier (who also wrote nonsense verses), and in newcomer Charles Bennett, who brings back some of Doyle’s perky flair, and introduces anamorphic puzzle pictures. Charles Keene had replaced the late John Leech, and it was Leech, so admired in France, who was given a memorial exhibit at the 1867 Exposition, in a booth reserved for Punch proprietors Bradbury and Evans. Punch did express some faint praise for the “liberal empire” in 1869–1870, but it was the FrancoPrussian War, the great debacle of 1870–1871, that once more riveted attention in Britain. In The French Porcupine (Fig. 3-21), there is a touch of Daumier, and his warning about the perils of a European

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Fig. 3-21. John tenniel, “the French Porcupine. he May be an inoffensive animal, but he don’t look like it” (Speech balloon: “the empire is Peace.”), Punch, February 19, 1859.

armaments race, for which British leaders initially blamed the French. As the war started, several big cuts show Louis Napoleon rejecting British neutrality and refusing British offers of mediation and medical aid. There was at first more “I told you so” than real sympathy for French misfortunes, more concern for the safety of Belgium than of France. Cham even unfairly accused the country he loved, and where he had relatives, of schadenfreude, of deriving pleasure from the imperial miseries, and the Siege of Paris (February 4, 1871). By July 1871, Punch had published eight big cuts in the preceding six months sympathetic to the plight of Paris, but excoriating the Commune as fiercely as did the bourgeois French media. Punch congratulated Prussia for twin victories, the one, for all its brutality, over France, and the other for the

crown prince winning the hand of Princess Victoria. At the end of our volume, we will explore two narrative strip series that Punch published in the midst of the war: only comic strips could indulge in the silliest papering-over of the cracks opened up by the bloodiest war in Europe since 1815. Punch takes no notice of the deposed French emperor’s exile in England, which was facilitated and attenuated by the British royal family, and much of which he devoted to plotting his restoration in France. His death passed unnoticed, that of his son almost so. And yet the prince imperial died a brave British officer, on June 1, 1879, fighting the Zulus.

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Pl. 3-1. richard doyle, “liberty’s vision of louis napoleon’s entry into Paris,” Punch, v. v, (october) 1848, p. 150.

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Pl. 3-2. richard doyle, “the Seven ages of the republic,” Punch, v. xv, (december) 1848, p. 224.

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Pl. 3-3. richard doyle, “the President’s Progress; or, the life and adventures of Prince louis-napoleon,” Punch, v. xv, (december) 1848, p. 277. 1 0 6     P U N C H — c u lt u r a l F r a n c o P h i l i a a n d P o l i t i c a l F r a n c o P h o B i a

Pl. 3-4. richard doyle, “ups and downs of Political life,” Punch, v. xvi, (March) 1849, p. 118.

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Pl. 3-5. richard doyle, “there iS no Place like hoMe,” Punch, v. xvi, (January) 1849. double-spread on facing pages. 1 0 8     P U N C H — c u lt u r a l F r a n c o P h i l i a a n d P o l i t i c a l F r a n c o P h o B i a

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Chapter 4

DOYLE’S BARRY-EUX (BAYEUX) TAPESTRY

D

oyle’s first venture into the comic strip in January 1848 holds a special significance in our survey on a number of levels: Our Barry-eux Tapestry has a wide-ranging context (pp. 119–22).

From History Painting to “Cartoon” This parody relives one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest of English historical events to be depicted in a great and immense work of art. If no artist seems to have proposed the Norman Conquest to decorate the new Houses of Parliament, was this because it must show a French (i.e., Norman) defeat of the English? Therefore not “patriotic” enough? The Parliament project, the first state-run national painting competition of its kind in Britain, proving long-drawn-out and contentious, was in a mess, anyway, ripe for ridicule. Norman Conquest, invasion scare, and medievalist parody made a heady mix.

As Ancient History and Art History The eleventh-century Tapestry as a historical document of great beauty had yet in mid-nineteenth century to find its place in art history. The original Tapestry (so-called: actually an embroidery, wool worked on linen), ordered by the conquerors and made by the conquered in the land conquered, in the (English) style of the period, became a major icon of art history only in the twentieth century. It is ironic that with Doyle a small parody should reach more people in England at the time than the huge, now celebrated original in Bayeux.

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The Palace of Westminster hall, erected before 1100, was the only ancient part of the whole building complex that survived the fire of 1834. In a neat coincidence, this ancient hall has been proposed by recent scholarship as a likely site for the original placement of the Tapestry.

The Original as Survivor over Nearly Ten Centuries Given the historical vicissitudes it has undergone, and its material fragility, the survival of the seventy-meter-long Tapestry may be regarded as miraculous. Doyle’s parody is the first to bring a mark of this miraculous survival to a broad English public. The Tapestry, most of its life residing in Bayeux, cannot have been well known in England at the time. It was long regarded as French. It probably hung, early on, in the Cathedral of Bayeux, after transfer from England (see below). First mentioned in Bayeux in the fifteenth century, the Tapestry was initially reproduced in a French antiquarian publication in the eighteenth century. Among the many vicissitudes it survived: in 1562 a narrow escape from the Sack of Bayeux by Huguenots; in 1792, during the French Revolution, proposed as a cover for wagons of munitions; in 1803 brought to Paris by Napoleon and installed in the museum named after him, to serve as propaganda for the invasion of England, “with enormous success politically and artistically.”1 It was returned to Bayeux when the invasion was abandoned. In 1818–1823, the first facsimile was produced in a luxurious, expensive volume, in Britain, not coincidentally soon after the British had reversed their ancient defeat by the French. In 1870–1871, the Tapestry was saved from the Prussian invasion. In 1885 an exact replica, full size, all seventy meters of it, made in the same materials as the original, was made by thirty-five English needle women and put in the Reading, England, museum, where it is still to be seen in an excellent

installation. During World War Two it was brought to Paris from Bayeux by another German invasion, and saved from transfer to Berlin by the D-Day landings and the Liberation in 1944, which returned it to Bayeux. This town was the first in France to be liberated, appropriately, by British soldiers, in what was seen as the capital of “liberated France.” In Britain in 1943 meanwhile it was reproduced as part of the war effort in the wake of the Battle of Britain, and after the D-Day landings. The Bayeux Tapestry inspired, above all, as a modern counterpart, the magnificent embroidery, made in England and completed 1972–1973 by artists (female, like the makers of the original Tapestry) from the Royal College of Needlework, and now in the D-Day museum in Portsmouth-Southsea. Operation Overlord (as the D-Day landings were called) recorded the “counter invasion” of the British (and US allies), in their liberation of France. Postscript January 2018: French president Macron offers to lend the fragile original Tapestry to Britain, in the ambiguous context of Brexit (the controversial British exit from the European Union, voted 2016). As if in emulation of Punch’s designation “Barry-eux Tapestry,” a British tabloid (The Sun) called it “The Bye-E. U. Tapestry” and a cartoon showed Premier Teresa May surrounded by the decapitated heads of her European enemies.2 The irony is leaden.

The Bayeux Tapestry as “Comic Strip”–like Narrative “Our Barry-eux Tapestry,” the first comic strip in Punch, evokes an original work frequently cited (without reference to Doyle’s parody) as a true far-flung ancestor of the comic strip format. Another so-called ancient comic strip ancestor is Hadrian’s Column in Rome, also parodied by Doyle (in the Almanack for 1848). Doyle turned its continuous sculptural account of the emper-

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or’s victories to another kind of anti-French—here anti-Napoleonic—satire. The “comic strip format” of the Bayeux Tapestry is explicitly validated as such by some recent authorities on the work (see below), as different from “virtually any other surviving work of art from the early Middle Ages in Europe: (1) in the way in which it tells its story in a fluid, continuous narrative style without using framing devices between scenes that are extrinsic to the action, and (2) its almost ribbon-like format.”3 There is now a recent (serious) “comic book” version of the Tapestry with small reproductions of the original, and English translations of the Latin inscriptions.4

The Little “Cartoon” Arises from the Ashes of a Great Building From the ashes of the Houses of Parliament, burned down in 1834 and rebuilt in a Gothic style still admired today, by architect Charles Barry, to whom the Barry-eux Tapestry is dedicated, there should have arisen a phoenix of large-scale nationalistic history

paintings decorating the interior of the new buildings. The project, much targeted by Punch, ran into many years of innumerable difficulties around the selection of designs, their exhibition, and as a basis for commissions. Young John Tenniel was among the many artists hoping to participate, and suffering like them the consequences of the general unfamiliarity with the fresco technique recommended for wall decoration. In 1841, the year that Punch was founded, a Select Committee on the Fine Arts was set up to oversee the decoration of the Palace of Westminster as it was being rebuilt. One of the stylistic models favored for the large-scale murals was the German or Nazarene School, which favored a medievalizing, outline style, such as Doyle so often would turn to parody and comic effect. Designs outlined boldly for transfer to fresco were the order of the day, as in traditional full-size “cartoons” (from the Italian cartone or fullsize preparatory drawing), one hundred and forty of which were exhibited in 1843. Punch offered its own humorous or parodic “cartoons” for this purpose. Doyle’s Bayeux parody was the first in line, and the term was eventually affirmed to mean any comic drawing.

Old Word Repurposed the origin of the term “cartoon,” long indispensable in english in its extension to any humorous drawing, but knowing no cognate in other languages is, as far as hitherto known, a little foggy. here is a clarification: i found the word first used in a very early Punch, in mock reference to raphael’s cartoons, on a tiny poster of daniel o’connell stuck on the wall of a print showing Jack russell (liberal prime minister) cutting his name on a beam (in parody of a cruikshank illustration, Fig. 4-1). it is doubtful that this joke was much noticed at the time. at the very end of June 1843 and volume 4 (p. 258), Punch printed a tiny advance plug for the publication of several “exquisite designs” fit to “astonish the Parliamentary committee, to be called Punch’S cartoonS!” the term came to replace the header “Punch’s Pencillings,” as used hitherto for the full-page political cut, in July–august 1843, but after “cartoon no. vi,” it was dropped as a header. these six designs stood

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Fig. 4-1. “Jack (russell) [prime minister] cutting his name on the beam” (after cruikshank), Punch’s Pencillings, no. xxii, december 11, 1841, p. 259.

as a kind of proposal for another kind of exhibition than those of contenders for the Parliament decorations, relating not to distant national history but to current scandals and the need for current reforms, as the “Pencillings” had done. the designs included radical, pro-poor “cartoons” we have cited for the early Punch (Figs. 3-1 and 3-2); the fifth cartoon, under the title “capital and labour” showed the poor and diseased working in a mine below a drawing room filled with the rich in luxurious ease. doyle’s Barry-eux Tapestry on the other hand was explicitly proposed by Punch for the new Parliament building, imagined as “cartoon” for a real-life tapestry to hang there. as a riff on the two distinct modern meanings of the term, and the long-current ascendance of the association with any humorous drawing over an art term familiar only to cognoscenti, i recall a drawing in Punch (1950s): a man is standing in front of the world-famous raphael cartoons (i.e., full-scale designs for the Sistine chapel tapestries) in the victoria and albert Museum, london, saying, “i like the art but i don’t get the joke.” the eventual extension of the term “cartoon” to any comic drawing was not initially applied by Punch, which called them “social cuts,” reserving “cartoon” for what was also called the “big cut” filling one or a double page.5

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Medievalism Doyle’s “medieval” style, is of course always more his own than a strict imitation. It was however everywhere in art and especially architecture. Some critics, including Punch, disapproved “the alarming spread of the German School of Art,”6 which was intended to revive a late medieval or early Renaissance style, and now pre-Raphaelite-ish. The new Houses of Parliament were built in a so-called Perpendicular or late Gothic style, a period that Doyle drew upon in his scene of an artist (a kind of self-portrait?) presenting his work to a patron (Fig. 4-4). Doyle’s humorous innocence contrasts with the alternative, portentous, and heroic styles then newly current, which he mocked by juxtaposing, under the heading “High Art and Royal Academy,” “Medieval[Fra] Angelico-Pugin-Gothic, or flat style” with the “Fuseli-Michael-Angelesque School” (Fig. 4-2). In his preferred semi-medieval style, the gentle Doyle aimed, above all, to distance himself from such bru-

tality; not for him the actual killing central to the Battle of Hastings as depicted in the Tapestry, and the “savagery” at its worst in the borders underneath, where bodies (of civilians and soldiers) are shown mutilated (see p. 122). Doyle’s choice of a style depending on stick figures innocent of all anatomy, volume, and perspective was intended, above all, to repudiate that “grand manner” inherited from the doctrines of Sir Joshua Reynolds, considered indispensable to the decorations of the House of Parliament. “Grand manner” encouraged sheer size. In July 1847 (v. 13, p. 19) Doyle had impersonated Mr Punch himself, perched on top of an enormous ladder painting Punch’s Own Picture, a huge canvas 35 feet by 10, in a totally eclectic kind of grand manner “that unites all styles and schools” (Fig. 4-3 and 4-4). (Young John Millais had recklessly offered a picture 10 x 14 feet to the Westminster Hall project.) Doyle has drawn this monstrous machine necessarily in outline as a cartoon-in-the-making, by an artist who claims (in

Fig. 4-2. richard doyle, “high art and the royal academy. Mediaeval-angelico-Pugin-gothic, or flat style.” / “Fuseli-Michael-angelesque School,” Punch, v. xiv, (october) 1848, p. 197.

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Fig. 4-3 & Fig. 4-4. richard doyle, “a gent presenting to his ladye love ye new number of ye popular periodical,” Punch v. xiii, (July) 1847, p. 11. / richard doyle, “Punch’s own Picture,” Punch, v. xiii, (July) 1847, p. 19.

the accompanying text) he is competent in all styles, historic and current, and is destined for immortality in the National Gallery. “Cartoon” has been joined by another neologistic art term, “doodle.” Doyle, with his graphic promiscuity visible all over Punch in a bewildering array of topics, subject and styles, decorations, almanac borders, and animated initials, may be termed the court clown, or doodler-in-chief: The Bayeux Tapestry parody is in its way a spicy cocktail of doodles—organized and narrativized. The graphic “doodle,” brilliantly theorized by Töpffer, was a term not introduced until the early twentieth century.

Inscriptions and Action As in most medievalizing drawings in Punch, and as in the titles of Doyle’s Manners and Customs,

inscriptions or captions on his Barry-eux Tapestry are given in a pseudo-archaic English. Doyle’s Old Englyshe inscriptions function like the Latin on the original to identify principal names of events, persons, and places. Doyle imitates the slightly awkward embroidered script, placing the “captions” above and below bordering the designs, rather than inside, as in the Tapestry. His favorite outline style is simplified but somewhat less elongated than in the Romanesque original. The French leader in the Barry-eux, in the place of Duke William, is the Admiral Prince de Joinville, King Louis-Philippe’s eldest son and heir, who had accompanied the remains of Napoleon I back to Paris to tremendous local acclaim. He was known to have flirted with the idea of invading England. His anonymous pamphlet, Note on the State of the Naval Forces of France, asserted that the admitted inferiority of the French navy was compensated by

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the new technology of steam, which could bring French ships much faster, irrespective of wind and tides, than in the time of Napoleon I.7 Doyle has, accordingly, fitted out the five ships shown bringing the French soldiers over the channel, with steam funnels. The enemy general, in place of Harold, is the aged Duke of Wellington, a national icon for his by now legendary victories over the French; he is represented just twice: once on the lookout (raising as it were the invasion scare), and once as an equestrian statue. This statue was the biggest in Britain, in its location on the “Wellington Arch” at Hyde Park Corner a controversial subject much ridiculed in Punch, which wanted it auctioned off and hidden from public view; or else have replicas made to line the south coast and replace the ineffective Martello Towers. (It was later removed to Aldershot, location of a royal military college, where it still stands.) But the real victor in the Punch narrative is (with typical narcissism) Mr Punch himself. Doyle sees no need to find modern equivalents for other ancient protagonists named in the original, such as Bishop Odo, who may have commissioned the Tapestry, or for the complex of preliminaries to the actual Battle of Hastings. The first half of the Bayeux Tapestry narrates preliminaries to the Norman crossing of the Channel and the battle of Hastings. Doyle starts with his own imaginary crossing, showing only four boats laden with soldiers, all more or less seasick in choppy waters (p. 119). He has no space for the realistic views of shipping regarded in the original as a primary document for the construction of Viking-style boats. In both versions, there is much wading ashore, and the principal armaments on both sides, ubiquitous spears and lances in 1066, long bayoneted rifles in 1848, and swords all along, give comparable accents. Doyle’s Frenchmen are heavily mustached; in the original the Normans are shown clean-shaven front and behind, while Harold’s English troops sport long thin upper-lip whiskers. Realism demands that

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Joinville’s advance on London be made by railway, at which “Ye rustics and domestick animals and peasants do expresse astonishmente” en route. The borders of the original Tapestry, where Aesopian and many other animals disport themselves, have puzzled interpreters, who have seen them as critical and even subversive. Doyle’s animals include “poodle-doges” (poodle-doodles) as very French unmilitary symbols of French frivolity. The only other dog, Mr Punch’s pug Tobias, is more effective, chasing Admiral Joinville. The French alone have horses in both versions. In 1066 the English army perforce had no cavalry, and by 1848 they didn’t appear to need any. Once in London, the primary military action is the French siege of the nerve-center of Britain, the Punch offices (p. 123). The French with their siege cannon are literally overthrown, but the way they “proceede savagelye againste the natyves” is encapsulated in a French soldier stabbing a recumbent portly gentleman, and being arrested by a London policeman with his regulation baton. He in turn is threatened with clubbing by a trio of French rifles. Another “atrocity” in Doyle—soldiers killing unarmed figures in the original—is the French attack on an apparent child and fleeing elderly ladies. The attempt to pull down the Wellington statue seems unlikely to succeed. A Punch article headed “London Taken by the French” (published just before Doyle’s parody), fussing about National Defences, has the brutal Marshal Bugeaud (of Algerian notoriety) sending home a bulletin boasting how with 50,000 men he seized all London’s most important places, and had the giant marble statue of Napoleon (still today in the Wellington Museum, Apsley House) replace the Wellington monument. Doyle’s last scene, corresponding to the original’s climax showing the flight of the English, is all about the flight of the French, including the poodles scattered by Mr Punch’s dog Toby. The FINIS seals the defeat of the French general, shown clinging to

a life-buoy (?) with a desperation lethal to his reputation if not his life. Time, and maiming of the original embroidery, has mitigated the shame of the English flight, which is abbreviated by restoration and supposed loss at the very end.

Stothard Edition Did Doyle go to Bayeux, on the Normandy coast not hard to reach from England by steamer? Punch time constraints likely prevented this, if even contemplated. Or did he simply refer to the Stothard lithographic edition of the Tapestry published in 1823, the first of its kind, and certainly available to him in the British Museum or London Library? With reproductions six inches high arranged two to a page in about the proportions of Doyle’s (i.e., oblong, 3:1), this faithful facsimile featured carefully registered colors, eight or so of them brighter than the now somewhat faded equivalents in the wool of the original. The decorative textures of the embroidery could not be matched, but additional emphasis of some contours in black, simplified to increase clarity, could have helped Doyle in his caricatural transposition of the ancient style. Stothard is punctilious in matter of detail. Had he worked in Doyle’s time, he might have felt constrained to omit the “naughty bits” preserved (to his credit) by the lithographer, notably the naked man with a very long, erect penis reaching for a naked woman, or the naked figure crouching nearby also conspicuous for his genitals (p. 122, bottom image).8 One supposes that reports picked up by “respectable” media such as Punch of French atrocities in Algeria, much in the news at this time with the capture of Abd-el-Kadr in early January, would have pruned the known sexual transgressions of the French, as well as much gruesomeness so evident in the Tapestry. The only proceeding deserving the term “savagelye” in Doyle’s inscription is simply omitted in the confusing verse left in our repro-

duction, which is certainly not by Doyle, and gets quite out of kilter with the drawings.9 To compare Doyle’s six small page-width vignettes, reaching 42 inches in length in toto, with the Tapestry design which extends to over 230 feet, may appear egregious. But a comparative inventory of the content shows a certain effort to mirror, as it were through a reducing glass, some primary dramatic ingredients. Doyle has packed in human figures often too tightly and too fragmentarily to count exactly, but it appears that he has nearly 200 figures to the Tapestry’s 623. Doyle’s six vignettes break down into perhaps eighteen or twenty distinct actions, while the Tapestry has seventy-five.10 Both works bring on stage, in comparable disproportions, a similar array of horses, dogs, buildings, ships, and trees. We do not of course look to Doyle for information about what actually happened back then, as we do with the Tapestry. It would be idle to confront Doyle’s fantasy with known history, as invited by the Tapestry which has been subjected to a kaleidoscope of scholarship and hypothesis, original, persuasive, implausible, different, alternative, and contradictory; confirming or not the often-unreliable written record. We have questioned the reality and seriousness of “an invasion scare” in 1847–1848. No need to assume Doyle felt obliged to use the “real” history in the Tapestry. In an age of altogether milder satire, and more scares than real wars, the invasion in Punch as imagined in mid-century is incomparably of a milder kind than that imagined by Gillray at the turn of the century in his Promis’d Horrors of a French Invasion (1796) (p. 123), which portrays grotesque violence unleashed by a civil war in the streets of London, complete with floggings, hangings, decapitation, and dismemberment. Gillray was satirizing the hyperbole of intra-party conflict provoked by the scare, which was real. Punch (along with the Duke of Wellington) was playing on anti-French feeling which was very real even if the invasion scare was not.

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Some readers would have known the Gillray, from an original or reprint. Fewer, I fancy, would have known the Stothard facsimile as I suppose Doyle did, or the original in Bayeux. The literature is remarkably silent on nineteenth-century references, by tourists for instance. Francophobes or not, some may even have been touched by a regret that the invasion of so long ago did take place, and did succeed—reminded perhaps, in a then recent popular novel by Benjamin Disraeli, of the romantic, medievalist view that Anglo-Saxon Britain had been a better, less impoverished, less unequal society before 1066: the Norman aristocracy had spoiled it all.11 The Bayeux Tapestry, made in England by the English for the English, has nonetheless been called “mendacious propaganda,” a “strip-cartoon designed to justify William’s unjustifiable [and piratical] invasion of England.”12 If so, it cannot have failed to inflame anti-Norman feeling among the defeated. But this is only one interpretation; another stresses how much anti–King Harold material was left out, or fudged—and how much undermining of the

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justice of the conquest is to be inferred from the “decorative” but mysteriously subversive or subtly ambiguous borders.13 Do we stray too far from a casual, lightweight comic strip parody into the conflicted interpretation of the complex and original work of art from which it derives? The Doyle parody is an interpretation of sorts, not of course scholarly, but given by Punch (and in this book) an odd, hitherto unknown humorous afterlife. We may however conclude with a linkage comparing great with small: In a long, rich tradition of marginalia to medieval illuminated manuscripts, all those remarkable and mysterious ancestors of modern comic, grotesque, and satirical art, the Bayeux Tapestry borders are outstanding. Our reproduction here gives the merest taste of this. The Bayeux borders are the distant antecedents to the nineteenth-century illustrated magazine, a Punch or Charivari, which constituted itself as a kind of ongoing satirical border to the “gospel truths” of official history.

Pl. 4-1-1 to Pl. 4-1-3. richard doyle, “Ye Foraye of the Frenche, from the veridical and righte pleasante chronicle of Maitre Punch,” Punch, January 1848, pp. 33–38. Six designs on six pages. d oY l e ’ S B a r r Y- e u x ( B aY e u x ) ta P e S t r Y     1 1 9

Pl. 4-1-2. richard doyle, “Ye Foraye of the Frenche, . . . Ye Frenche army advances / advances of Ye troopes and Poodle doges . . . ,” Punch, January 1848, pp. 33–38. 1 2 0     d oY l e ’ S B a r r Y- e u x ( B aY e u x ) ta P e S t r Y

Pl. 4-1-3. richard doyle, “Ye Foraye of the Frenche, . . . they besyege Ye offycer of Mister Punch . . . / Joinville Brytishe channel . . . ,” Punch, January 1848, pp. 33–38. d oY l e ’ S B a r r Y- e u x ( B aY e u x ) ta P e S t r Y     1 2 1

Pl. 4-2. details from border of original eleventh-century Bayeux tapestry.

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Pl. 4-3. James gillray, “Promis’d horrors of the French invaSion,” etching, october 20, 1796.

Chapter 5

DOYLE The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson (1854)

B

orn in 1824, Richard Doyle was the son of Irish Catholic John Doyle, the successful author of the mild portrait caricatures he signed HB. Richard was taught by his father, who actively encouraged his precocity. A parodist of Flaxman at the age of twelve, at fifteen the young Doyle published and sold a series of plates on the Eglington Tournament, a bizarre event of 1839 that failed ingloriously, in which, as we noted, Louis Napoleon participated. In 1840, Doyle wrote and illustrated a Journal, which he kept almost daily throughout the year, running to 153 pages, with hundreds of designs of all sizes and characters, from a tiny single figure to the full width theatrical and crowd scenes. The volume included (under August 8) the tiniest scenes of Louis Napoleon clinging to a life buoy and a larger one of him rushing around Boulogne shouting “Vive l’Empereur” during his ill-fated attempted coup, incidents the author will later reprise. The text was neatly inscribed to fit in all around the pictures. It was a mature, fully professional work, drawn in a graphic style he would vary but scarcely supersede, and in many ways similar to the Foreign Tour fifteen years later. The Journal was not published at the time, but was printed, in facsimile, in 1885 and 1980. We can properly call The Foreign Tour of Mssrs Brown, Jones and Robinson a graphic novel, and a highlight of our present study, but it is not an easy fit. There are times when we feel a novel brewing, in the excess of captions slowing down the action, and captions trying too hard to add to, complement, or even substitute for the graphics. Doyle may have felt there was such a novel lodged inside him, especially after his abrupt

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severance from Punch, the weekly that had secured his reputation and livelihood for eight years. Doyle’s  verbal and narrative skills may have exceeded Cruikshank’s, but they were certainly not up to those of the other Punch contributors. Nevertheless, the ingenuity, curiosity, and sheer novelty of Doyle’s Foreign Tour, as a series of admittedly disjointed and too often undeveloped actions, should be honored. It is an amusing even if graphically disappointing chronicle extending its smallscale initiation in Punch. His weakness in the representation of attitudes and in contours simplified but now become limp, is to a degree compensated by his blending of outline and shadowed styles. There was no precedent for Doyle’s experiment. But sadly, it was apparently never reviewed and was likely a commercial failure. Töpffer, the master of travel writing and pictorial comic narrative, was known up to a point in England in both genres and surely available to Doyle in the original French via the Delaporte bookstore. His Journal (1840), shows him haunted as a boy yearning to see his own work in the shop window. The narrative imaginative extravagance of albums by Cham and youthful Doré would have seemed out of reach for the modest, sensitive Doyle. But he must have appreciated that the outline style and subject matter of his Manners and Customs were imitated by the biggest illustrated news magazine in France, L’Illustration, and acted as a stimulus on Doré in his renditions of peasant life.1 Since the original 1854 edition of The Foreign Tour can be found in many libraries and reprints were made in 1885 and 2013, we limit reproduction here to two significant, coherent, and relatively developed episodes. We include an overview of themes, those recurring and singular, to give an idea of how Doyle strives for variety as well as typicality.

The Trio The trio of titular protagonists, first introduced in the pages of Punch in 1850, are not much differentiated, but determine some of the individual incidents. Brown is the artist, whether as committed amateur or professional, standing in for the author as keeper of the journal. His pursuit of sketches leads him several times into mild trouble. Robinson, the least interesting of the trio, is short, plump, unathletic, and prone to accidents. The tall, arrogant Jones is positively dangerous, exhibiting a casual violence shared by his uncontrolled sausage-thieving dog (p. 131) which threatens serious trouble.2

Frontier, Security, and Other Official Harassment We who suffer much from security arrangements when traveling can empathize with the constant harassment at frontiers by officials both military and civilian. Borders, many unnamed, abound, and internal checks also. Passport control may be a nuisance, but customs and baggage checks are an invitation to official carelessness and casual rudeness at best, and a destructive instinct bordering on sadism and savagery, at worst. Add to this the epidemic of spies afflicting visitors to states all over Germany, which in their paranoia feared revival of the dread 1848–1849 revolutions. Punch editor Douglas Jerrold and writer Shirley Brooks were among those refused entry into the Austrian dominions in Italy. As today, governments saw potential terrorists everywhere, even or especially among visitors from England known to harbor refugees from all over.

English Touristic Vices Spoiled by their domestic comforts, the English have no tolerance for the banal inconveniences of trav-

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el abroad. Coming from a “superior” civilization, our three heroes do not take kindly to fleas in the bed, mosquitoes in the dining room, and lack of soap and water in the bedroom. Superiority breeds arrogance. Notorious all over Europe as arrogant, supercilious, and imperious, numerically and financially dominant, they tend to look down on everyone and everything else, including the sights they have come to see. The famous sights are deemed unworthy of the stereotypical solitary Milord buried in his English newspaper from the inside of his carriage. For the undersized, overdressed, jaded swell, “the whole concern [upon the Rhine] is a ‘do’ and a ‘sell.’” Is it the sheer crowds, or repetition that jades the appetite? Our trio standing rudely in the midst of kneeling worshippers, “do” Cologne Cathedral without even seeing it, profane the local piety and sanctity of churches and that of the Vienna opera by slovenly dress and behavior (Jones again). They all buy useless tourist products, but are ostentatiously revolted by the smell of the famous Eau de Cologne. Other British types are the perennial grumbler, “big, burly, and in danger of choking from the tightness of his cravat,” the Great Briton who commands the view of a country(side) that might be his, if he had a mind for it and could make it meet his standards; the bore, who like most of his nation knows no other language, seeks out compatriots to assail, becoming for a while as unwelcome, ubiquitous, and intrusive as the government spies. The ultimate banal discourtesy is perhaps that of the English snob who scribbles his name on the roof of Milan cathedral. The conflict of tourism with local custom is as old as tourism itself. In England beggars came in singles, on the continent in besieging and threatening groups (see p. 140), distressing and obtrusive although not as horribly cretinous and aggressive as in the little army in pursuit of the hero in Doré’s Displeasures of a Pleasure Trip (1851).3 The staccato

of satirical squibs, the crazy quilt of discomfort settling over the whole account is relieved by a variety of calming effects: picturesque landscape, public garden and city street, with predictable visits to museums. Perilous travel in the Alps by coach is offset by the merry conviviality of the Rhine boat, and the portrait of “Marie of the Lago d’Orta, maid of the inn, most beautiful of waitresses . . .” and so on, at excessive length. Here is Brown’s and Doyle’s chance (based no doubt on a real-life sighting) for a bit of obligatory romance, which the timid bachelor Doyle passes up, waxing lyrical about the passion with which he might have approached her, and dared not. Instead he vents his pent-up desire, and the impulse to defend her against a tyrannical she-dragon of a landlady, in long, pictureless captions. If the whole story lacks the kind of sustained physical energy required of the best comic strips, this may be attributed to Doyle’s personality: he was of a notoriously shy and retiring nature. Moreover, this moment of the mid-Victorian age was not conducive to amorous excitements at this popular level. Excitement arrives, however, as well as more coherent development, in the following two adventures, which we reproduce.

“Of the Adventure that Befell Jones” This incident reveals Jones as the incarnation of the worst of English arbitrary insolence and aggressiveness in his treatment of a tiny sentry of a tiny German state (Baden) with a reputation for rowdy gambling. Jones is tall, a head above everybody else, and almost twice the size of the sentry. Jones’s hostile dog (already established as an unrestrained sausage thief), running loose, starts the trouble by annoying the sentry and putting his owner at fault. Faced with the tiny sentry’s bayonet, Jones absurdly and gratuitously challenges the “miserable foreigner” to a bout of fisticuffs (p. 146). (Cham treats the

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English addiction to boxing matches as a national stereotype.) A “terrific struggle” ensues that ends in the total defeat and humiliation of the German sentry, whom Jones lifts bodily into the air and throws to the ground, leaving him half-dead. While Jones smugly recounts his little victory over breakfast in his hotel, a regiment of soldiers descends upon him, arrests him, and hauls him off, a giant of a man at the mercy of a posse of dwarfs. British diplomacy, in the person of the British minister, to the rescue, in a manner calculated to insult the tiny German state, officially accuse it of operating “a system at once tyrannical and cruel,” etc., etc. A map of Europe hangs, significantly, on the wall of his grand residence. Ex officio expected to do a bit of normal diplomatic bullying, the minister advises the trio to leave forthwith, unscathed. The drawing below, of pretty peasantry in pretty headdresses who are not pleased by Brown’s attention to them, suggests the trio are happy to be on their way out, but have learned nothing from their little adventure, or their symbolic victory over and insult to the weakest corner of a notoriously fragmented part of Europe (thirty-six independent states in greater Germany before unification under Bismarck). Baden depended on gambling and tourism, but had its honor to defend. What made it all worse was the ceremonious announcement in the press of the visit by an English trio, graced with exaggerated titles, also invited, as distinguished foreigners (i.e., any kind of Englishman) to observe a grand military review. The very public event is shown in a full-page “splash” panel, with features numbered as if it were an important news item in the press. In the thick of it, Robinson, wearing a Captain of Yeomanry uniform and riding a specially hired horse, completely humiliates himself.4 The other coherently developed incident (“Verona,” pp. 141–51) concerns what should be Brown’s perfectly innocent, indeed admirable habit of sketching. He finds himself stymied by an

Austrian detective in northern Italy, at this time groaning under the Austrian yoke. The detective, that is the eye of the Austrian government singled out with synechdochic emphasis (p. 79), who has never seen a sketching stool, is suspicious and detains it. Undeterred, Brown sits on the grass to sketch, where he is surprised by a posse of soldiers, accused of drawing fortifications (an old topos going back to Hogarth’s Calais Gate) and of sporting a hat of illegal shape.5 This notorious accusation in itself could lead to expulsion. The suspect here is marched off. Jones, in character, fights back energetically, knocking over his armed assailants while Robinson quietly submits. Together with other incriminating evidence, straight portrait drawings of Austrian and Croatian military types are deemed libelous, and brought before the governor of Verona. Jones, with dignified aplomb, pompously declares “Civis Romanus sum,” but the deus ex machina is the discovery by the governor, Field-Marshal Lieutenant Count Brown of the Imperial Service, that the prisoner is a near and cherished relation. “Civis [Britannicus?] sum” does the trick, and there are no repercussions (pp. 141–45).

German Tourists Worse off in Germany A quick look at evidence, close in date, from Germany’s own view of government repression: A sequence amounting to a graphic novel in its sheer volume, bigger even than Doyle’s—about two hundred drawings spread over twenty-two issues and twelve months—appeared in the German Punchequivalent Fliegende Blätter (1851–1852). This magazine saw the disorderly, restive agglomeration of so many independent states as a miasma of police surveillance and paranoia, headed of course by Prussia. Out of the Fliegende’s Bavaria, self-identified as an easygoing contrast to the stiff and stern overbearing Prussian state out to prussify all of Germany,

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came Carl Stauber’s The Pleasure Trip of Herr Blaumaier and his wife Nanni. Here too we find the petty annoyances and discomforts of tourism. But for the German tourists themselves, neither of them suffering from the embarrassing pretensions of a Jones or Brown, the official harassments are more

severe and continuous, and there is no recourse to superior authorities or claims of British nationality to save them from being roughed up and kicked around, or having padlocks (in the drawings, literally) put on their mouths. No legal recourse either: all the lawyers—the whole judiciary in fact—are in jail.

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Pl. 5-1-1 & Pl. 5-1-2. richard doyle, “Pleasure trips of Brown, Jones and robinson, the visit to epsom,” Parts i and ii, Punch, v. xix, (July) 1850, p. 24.

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Pl. 5-1-2. richard doyle, “Pleasure trips of Brown, Jones and robinson, the visit to epsom,” Parts i and ii, Punch, v. xix, (July) 1850, p. 24.

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Pl. 5-2. richard doyle, “Pleasure trips of Brown, Jones and robinson” (at the review), Punch, v. xix, (august) 1850, p. 60.

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Pl. 5-3. richard doyle, “Brown, Jones and robinson go to the Zoological gardens,” Punch, v. xix, (august) 1850, p. 64.

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Pl. 5-4-1 to Pl. 5-4-3. richard doyle, “Brown, Jones and robinson—and how they went to a ball,” Parts i and ii, and “the Ball and its consequences,” Part iii, Punch, v. xix, (august/September) 1850, p. 80. d oY l e : T H E F O R E I G N T O U R O F M E S S R S B R OW N , J O N E S A N D R O B I N S O N     1 3 3

Pl. 5-4-2. richard doyle, “Brown, Jones and robinson—and how they went to a ball,” Part ii.

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Pl. 5-4-3. richard doyle, “Brown, Jones and robinson—and how they went to a ball,” Part iii.

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Pl. 5-5. richard doyle, “Brown, Jones and robinson.—the riding School,” Punch, v. xix, (october) 1850, p. 152.

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Pl. 5-6-1 & Pl. 5-6-2. richard doyle, “the Pleasure trips of Brown, Jones and robinson (up the rhine),” two parts, Punch, v. xix, (november) 1850, p. 196 and p. 212. d oY l e : T H E F O R E I G N T O U R O F M E S S R S B R OW N , J O N E S A N D R O B I N S O N     1 3 7

Pl. 5-6-2. richard doyle, “the Pleasure trips of Brown, Jones and robinson (up the rhine),” Part ii.

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Pl. 5-7. richard doyle, “tourists upon the continent in the Year of revolutions,” Punch, almanack for 1850, v. xviii.

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Pl. 5-8-1 to Pl. 5-8-12. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson, being the history of what they saw and did, in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, 1854, pp. 57–62 and 32–37. 12 pp. 1 4 0     d oY l e : T H E F O R E I G N T O U R O F M E S S R S B R OW N , J O N E S A N D R O B I N S O N

Pl. 5-8-2. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-3. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-4. Excerpts from Richard Doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-5. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-6. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-7. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-8. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-9. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-10. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-11. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-8-12. excerpts from richard doyle, The Foreign Tour of Messrs Brown, Jones and Robinson.

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Pl. 5-9-1. ernest griset. our artist in Paris, Pt. i, Punch, July 13, 1867.

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Pl. 5-9-2. ernest griset. our French artist in Paris, Pt. ii, Punch, aug. 3, 1867.

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Chapter 6

FRANCOPHOBIA The Flight of Louis-Philippe, in Puppet Show (1848), and Louispetit and His Bird in Diogenes (1855)

T

he short-lived Puppet Show, started by journalist and novelist James Hannay and the Vizetelly brothers (owners), and edited by John Procter, was Punch-y in design, and at ten pages managed to appear at one penny, a third of the Punch price. Launched on March 18, 1848, with the anonymous The Flight of Louis-Philippe (unsigned, possibly by H. G. Hine, Pls. 6-1-1 to 6-1-4), Punch biographer Spielmann says it “kept up a running fire at Punch,” exposing its habit of “picking and stealing” its jokes,1 but The Puppet Show’s animus, from the first, was against the French king exiled by the February Revolution. It is as if this huge event which had terminated in his taking refuge in England only a week before, in itself spurred on the launching of a new journal. The king’s ignominious flight was a prominent feature for the first three issues, and run in twenty-four scenes, with much scathing verse attached. The magazine however lasted for only eighteen months (until August 26, 1849), despite its use of Social Sketches by Gavarni, badly copied onto wood, and despite its attempted reorganization/reconception as the New Puppet Show, keeping all the original contributors. Henry Vizetelly, who supervised (and cut) the illustrations, was said to have brought in cuts by his friend Cham, which is unlikely: if so, they are unsigned, unidentified, and the artist had departed the country some time before the magazine started. One of the cuts is however described by the only source for this, Cham’s first biographer, as showing an exhausted French national guardsman on duty who wishes he was born in peaceful England.2

154

Fig. 6-1. “the certified Pauper,” The Puppet-Show, 1849, p. 136.

Like Punch, The Puppet Show was Francophobic at the time, and like Punch combined reformist instincts with crude hostility to poor law reform, as we see in the comic strip “The Certified Pauper” (Fig. 6-1). The latter satirizes the alleged treatment of paupers like spoiled guests in a good hotel. As

Dickens showed, there were some slight improvements from the 1830s in sentencing practices and prison conditions, but punishment remained “unspeakably inhuman and barbaric.” It was not until 1861 that the number of capital offenses was reduced from fifteen (including theft of five shillings’ worth

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of goods) to virtually one.3 There were close to one million paupers in a population of seventeen million (Karl Marx in 1859). Could pauperism be eliminated by better treatment of paupers? Dickens said no. In many ways, moreover, paupers were treated little better than criminals. There was, naturally, no sympathy for the exiled king: “Thy fall is freedom’s birth. Today thou are too mean for scorn, a vagrant on the earth. Too guilty for our sympathy, too paltry for our hate. Thou parricide of liberty—thou old man desolate.” The opening vignette in The Flight of Louis-Philippe (pp. 165–68) has the king reduced to military epaulettes below a pear for his head, which uses the symbol current in France since Philipon launched it in the early 1830s, and went to prison for it. The “pear” had something of the king’s real head, improved by his pointy wig, and was current as a term of ridicule, “poire” meaning fathead, and having phallic associations. It descended even to the child’s graffito, and as such was remembered in an anecdote that passed into history, and was recorded thirty years later by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. It tells how the king, passing by such a wall graffito, amiably showed the urchin his real effigy on a coin that he gave to the young graffitist. The king’s virtually featureless face, with its rudimentary down-turned mouth and eyes, sitting at an empty table spread with a plain cloth (i.e., the popular “banquet” he ignores at his peril), signifies here the vacuity of his rule and policies. A public banquet in Paris was used to generate opposition, and the latest, scheduled for February 24 and forbidden by the police, set off waves of violent protest. The vacant royal face conveys the “stupefying” inertia of the king at this moment,4 as does the next vignette where, unconcerned, he dresses for dinner, his head smothered in curl papers. He sits on his umbrella, the ever-present symbol of the prudence and modesty of the “citizen-king.” Aroused at last from his torpor, he bribes the “commandant of the forts,” but fails in all attempts to get the army on his side.

The commotion in the streets convinces him that the threat to his throne is real. He accedes “with tears in his eyes”—in reality, it is his wife and family who weep as he writes his resignation. The refusal of the young Republic to leave him with his old umbrella signals that the king will receive no privileged treatment in defeat. In full flight, wearing the scarf of his habitual national guard uniform, he breaks through the ranks of cavalry, who are confused and literally at cross purposes. His army is divided and, in fact, subverted by the national guard who helped bring him to power in 1830, and now want to avoid more bloodshed. His desperate, unheard shouting is directed at crowds of dubious loyalty. The drama thickens, with the expected cabbie found dead. The king is “shoved most unceremoniously into a cab” apparently by a mixed force of national guards and rebellious workers with bayonets: are the latter opposing the former, in an attempt to seize the king? If so, the scene encapsulates the divided allegiance of the French people, over this comic-opera flight, so rich in picturesque and tragicomic incident, and reported as such at the time. Said Alexis de Tocqueville: “a bad tragedy played by provincial actors.” 5 The frantic arrival of the king’s valet, Thuret, at Saint Cloud “with a clean shirt” refers to the several occasions when this faithful and brave servant did indeed try to restore some decency and dignity to the disheveled, humiliated monarch. The king, clothed in fact like an ordinary civilian, is shown here and almost until the end, on his arrival in England, wearing his national guard uniform, having “immolated” only whiskers and wig. Meanwhile he has to beg sympathizers for cash donations, since he had (in reality) to flee with only 15 francs in his pocket and a briefcase of personal papers, leaving behind in his office 700,000 francs. His abject hiding behind a stove echoes the biographic “he sat huddled in a corner, shivering— was it from fear or was it from cold?”6 The physical discomforts, poor accommodations, and hunger he

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suffered, sometimes with his loyal wife morosely looming over him, are conflated from various incidents, including his taking refuge in a poor farmhouse kitchen outside Evreux, from where the loyal farmer drives him to Honfleur. Is this farmer the wretched-looking hobo waving good-bye from the Norman coast in scene 21? More probably the figure is intended as a composite of the lower-class help he got along the way. The destitute disgraced king is saved by the providential arrival of two sacks of cash containing 12,000 francs (not illustrated). His arrival in England (March 4), incognito and in a comical, suspicion-arousing disguise, is marked by more financial transactions, and a view of the “Napoleon of Peace” looking into a future in exile, which would turn out to last only until his death in 1850, at the ripe age of seventy-six. With the assistance of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the ex-king is settled comfortably and honorably enough in a mansion at Claremont. A fortunate termination in a country that suspected the king of evil designs upon it? He had leisure now to make the comparison with the dignified exit of Charles X, the predecessor he had ousted in 1830.

Watts Phillips, The Model Republic, Cato Potts in Paris (1848) Watts Phillips, future caricaturist, comic strip author, and man of the theater, is forgotten today. He was one of those Anglo-French binationals who found himself studying in Paris, at age twenty-three, and caught up in the Revolution. He detested the Republic it brought, briefly, to power. On returning to London, he produced for the specialist publisher David Bogue a twenty-leaf foldout (“roller picture”) containing twenty-four etchings, called The Model Republic. The protagonist Cato Potts (named after the radical ancient Roman Marcus Porcius Cato) flees to “peaceful and fraternal Paris” (actually to escape his creditors), where he is locked up for having

Fig. 6-2. watts Phillips, “cato . . . Joins a Society of “Friends of humanity . . .” From The Model Republic, 1848.

no passport. He survives republican sabotage, robbery, and near murder by Red Republicans for wearing the wrong color ribbon. The gift of a miniature guillotine marks his membership in the “Friends of Humanity” Society (Fig. 6-2)—perhaps in reference to a sanguinary habit of the Terror in 1792.7 Trade is down, the press is shackled. Wakened by gunfire and virtually imprisoned, he escapes through the roof, is assailed by bullets and captured by an insurgent captain “Man of the People” who first orders him hanged, and then to fight for the Republican cause. The reluctant Cato escapes to Boulogne, back to the UK, and “thanks God he is an Englishman.” All this dramatizes, presumably, something of Phillips’s own experience and view of Republican Paris in its early months. Watts Phillips would later (c. 1850), in another fold-out comic strip, satirize the English electoral system for its familiar failings: its corruption, and the drunken, ignorant, bribed voters returning his over-moneyed opponent, Mr Croesus Brown.8

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Watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, Louispetit and His Bird After Louis-Philippe, and the Second Republic, came the prince-president, soon-to-be-emperor LouisNapoleon (III), who imposed strict censorship. It was left to the English to do what was impossible in France: a satirical life of the usurper, nephew of Napoleon I, son of Queen Hortense and Louis, King of Holland, brother of the first emperor. Napoléon le Petit was so-called by his detractors, as opposed to Napoléon le Grand, notably by Victor Hugo (from exile, in 1852), and as here by Diogenes. This magazine alone, a relatively radical one, dared to publish a comic strip cutting the man down to size without falsifying his history hitherto, the known facts of which were exotic, and in some ways ready-made

comedy. The principals on the journal, Watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, well knew they were attacking not only a head of the neighboring state, but “unpatriotically,” Britain’s Crimean war ally. The cover shows a fierce-looking Diogenes, throwing light on violent and fleeing figures (Fig. 6-3). Punch’s mockery of the French upstart leader caused Thackeray to quit the magazine and Punch to be forbidden in France. To be found with the anti-Napoleon Belgian Charivari (Le Charivari Belge, 1852–1854), not to speak of Diogenes, could put you in jail. Yet Louis-Napoleon, while he was said to have “feared pictures even more than words,”9 collected cartoons of himself. Diogenes (1853–1855), started at two pence for eight pages, soon enlarged to three pence for sixteen pages, thus larger than and the same price as Punch.

Fig. 6-3. B. P. a. nicholls, Diogenes, first issue cover, Jan. 1, 1853.

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Advertisements show that women were a target audience. Announcing by July 1853 weekly sales of 5,000 stamped, and circulation of 25,000 unstamped copies, this “exceedingly clever paper”10 could by the end of the first volume boast of “tremendous success,” cite a host of plaudits from the press at large, and as “in a fair way to excel [Punch]”—yet well to the left of the senior journal. Fearless, trembling not before king or miter, Diogenes’s “pen shall be of steel, and my ink gall.” It was openly anticlerical and anti-Sabbatarian (i.e., against closure of secular Sunday entertainments), and opposed to “those who make a vain boast of the name of Liberty, yet mock her in their every act.” Taking up where Punch had left off, Diogenes defended the “Gentle, the suffering, and the good,” the marginalized, the sempstress “slaves of the needle,” Labor in the grasp of the ogre of Capital, and “the wild tribes of London,” that is, the poor. From the start scenarist Watts Phillips deplores the newly declared French emperor and pities the French people. “See their country enslaved, see all law overthrown, / See all Liberty stifled . . . a government made up of falsehood and guile, / Menial, submissive, degraded and vile!” The emperor might even invade England, especially if allied with Russia, the common enemy of the moment.11 Louispetit and His Bird, subtitled A History more Wonderful than ‘Whittington and his Cat,’ in the (exactly) one hundred drawings comprising eleven installments published June to July 1855, covers the historical years 1840 to 1852 (pp. 169–79). A true comic strip in form, it relates in a very condensed, indeed fragmentary and confused way, episodes of the complicated ascent to power and the imperial title of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. The longer history would make a good graphic novel today (is there one perhaps?), about a “life [which] reads like cross between an old-fashioned novel and a modern film script” or “a military parade crossing a masked ball.”12 The story must, I believe, be a collaboration between Diogenes’s chief editor and founder Watts

Phillips as scenarist, with Matthew Sears (who signs six of the plates), presumably as artist. Phillips followed Parisian politics in the revolutionary years 1848–1849, when he often resided in France and, as we have seen, derided the Republic. To match scenario with known history defies clarity and makes for much confusion. The major source of confusion is that of the two insurrections, in Strasbourg 1836 and Boulogne 1840, impossible to disentangle here, with its misplaced chronologies. Some readers may have noticed this, and expressed concern as to the veracity of this early part. The authors of the comic strip, unabashed, add at the bottom of Episode 5 a discreet, ironic note: “In answer to numerous enquiries, we reply that we are pursuing a real history with a fidelity that would honor Macaulay. The history is a perfect extravaganza” . . . which will bring the circulation of Diogenes “to a million a week.” To reconcile his “extravaganza” with known history turned out to be if not impossible, just uninteresting. I therefore follow or summarize what the pictures say, or in the spirit of what they say. For continuity I fill a few historical gaps where appropriate. The story begins basically with the year 1840, and the failed insurrection of that year in Boulogne. A preamble glides over an early life of precocious ambitions to enter a continuous web of conspiracies. Louis is from the start abetted by the mascot of an omnipresent eagle—the bird of the title—which is hatched by him in the egg, and accompanies him throughout as a symbol of his conspiratorial mania, and as the long-suffering ghost of his uncle. This scruffy eagle (in reality likely to be a stuffed vulture, bought for the occasion) is a sinister presence in the narrative. “Louis was a born and devious conspirator. ‘If only I could stop him conspiring with himself against himself!’ the exasperated Princess Mathilde, his cousin and erstwhile fiancée, once said.”13 Louis was aged seven when his family was banished in 1815 with the downfall of his uncle. After school in Augsburg 1821–1823 and then a Swiss military college to study artillery, with his elder,

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Fig. 6-4. the prince plays the sentimental pantomime / the victor at eglington [see p. 85]. Pendant to the painting of the battle of austerlitz, attended by a fat officer. / “it’s the prince passing with his two friends, the nephew of wellington and the son of Sir hudson lowe” [jailor of Bonaparte on St helena, much hated by the French]. “there’s a gallant prince and not proud.” / “who will never hurt us english the way his wretch of an uncle did!” / the prince competes for the constable’s cudgel. it is by beating up the english chartists [demonstrators demanding reforms] that one learns how to govern France. From Les Aventures illustrées (ninon illustres) du Prince pour Rire [i.e., Joke Prince], comic strip by nadar in Revue Comique, 1849.

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Carbonarist brother, he joined the “Young Italy” movement in its efforts to unify Italy and end Austro-papal domination. This, subsequent plots, and an ambitious destiny are announced by the second egg Louis hatches in No. 1. Under sentence of death from an Austria engaged in wiping out the revolt in Italy, Louis makes an epic escape across half Europe (not shown). He is present at the May 5, 1831, Paris demonstrations commemorating the anniversary of the death of Napoleon I, where the cry “Vive L’Empereur” was heard round the Vendôme column. This appeal to his illustrious uncle is rendered as a pawnbroker’s three gold balls stop sign, egged on by the omnipresent, bedraggled (fake) imperial eagle. Funds are seized in England by forced loans from fellow conspirators. The Vendôme column incident, better developed (and misplaced) in No. 2, provoked Louis’s expulsion from France to England (this shown bottom of No. 2). Not shown are his extravagant life and amours in luxurious English exile after the failed Strasbourg insurrection of 1836. If this exile is omitted (as an embarrassment to an English readership?), not so in France 1849, where mockery of the prince for his apparent welcome by the hereditary enemy was still possible (Fig. 6-4). No. 2. Shows Louispetit, shipwrecked off Boulogne in another failed insurrection (1840), failing to raise the garrison and (in a mistaken chronology) the hapless eagle onto the “Napoleon Column” (the Vendôme column). No. 3. He tries to escape again by water; his confederates try to hide, absurdly, but are caught, as he is himself. No. 4. His confederates seem to desert him (not so in fact).14 He is tried, found guilty, and sentenced to “perpetual” jail in Ham fortress, where he makes shadow-play with the silhouette of the eagle-talisman taken from him but still a haunting dream. No. 5. Still dreaming of a Napoleonic Return from Elba, Louis writes intensively: “Extinction of

Pauperism” is just one book (much sold and read). The prisoner’s living conditions were in reality at first dire but later improved. Jailed nominally in perpetuity, Louis (in No. 4) is shown in perpetual movement spinning a barred, circular cage. Exempt as he was from hard labor, this “squirrel or hamster” cage15 is a metaphor for his perpetual motion of continued plotting in jail, from which he breaks out (in No. 5). Apart from engaging in much writing, he was given freedom to read and receive letters at will— 232 letters to Hortense Cornu alone, in five years; to pursue hobbies, and even entertain mistresses. Is the chief of these, a chambermaid who bore him two children conceived in jail, coded in the female figure shown pleading with the distressed prisoner in the third design (preceding the trial in No. 4)? More likely she refers, appropriate to the caption “A momentous question,” to the (chronologically misplaced) Princess Mathilde, whom Louis still hoped to marry until he received news in December 1840 that she had wed a rich Russian prince.16 The “strict watch” kept by one of the sixty guards among the four hundred soldiers stationed at the fortress is meant ironically. In fact, there were constant visitors, organizing the prisoner’s financial maneuvers, fundraising, issuing propaganda, planning escape. The escape itself (in 1846) was a secret one—no need to break bars. The guards who allow the prisoner to walk calmly out of the jail disguised as a workman carrying a beam of wood (this is verified) are horror-stricken. The Bonapartist eagle of his dreams carries him over the Channel to the comforts and familiarity of England—to the good life, even if Phillips-Sears shows the fugitive in an untidy attic. No. 6. The scene now shifts to old unpopular King Louis-Philippe, betrayed by his own army, impeached and exiled eight years later. The Republic is installed, with the original revolutionary flag, and a tranquility that neither the workers nor the socialists (3,000 workers killed in June, 6,000 arrested) nor

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the fiscal crisis can disturb. In the same attic garret as before, omitting the grand, well-protected life he led for so many years in England, he “meditates” with his aquiline companion, and watches for the improved conditions for his return. (This was facilitated by his English aristocratic and moneyed contacts, notably the rich Elizabeth Howard, who became his maîtresse en titre when he was installed as president of the Republic.) No. 7. He reconnoiters Paris, briefly (February 28 to March 2, 1848), in style, and bides his time, before returning on September 24 to stand as deputy in the parliamentary elections. “The people are startled” at his presence and his speeches with their wholly spurious promises: he plays a “difficult” duplicitous game, swearing “to the Republic one moment, and at her the next,” and is easily elected. Considered friendly and approachable, he is backing neither General Cavaignac (probably the heavily bearded figure in the fourth vignette, cozying up to the Republic), nor the workers, but promotes the oxymoronic but nonetheless persuasive idea of a Napoleonic Republic. No. 8. We are shown, correctly, the army as the key to his success; he fraternizes with them, visiting their hospitals, gives banquets and honors, shares in their sports—this a charming if childish display. It is all a “blend of the circus, the tournament, and the quest. . . . With a dash of gaiety about it all”17— lubricated with funds from Miss Howard. Note the military uniform which the prince-president habitually wore to denote his primary allegiance. Thus the final image, Louis Napoleon as the newly elected president of the Republic, fused with the eagle wings hovering over a huge square peopled by an immense, perfectly disciplined and devoted army (significantly facing in all four directions), a detachment of which, on the fourth, far distant side is visible off fighting with cannon. Such imperial militarism provokes the British lion to fear or invent yet another invasion scare (No. 9). From president of the Republic installed now as “despotic” emperor

(The Times, cited in 1853), Louis “gulls” the English business elite into fawning obeisance and the French (Bourbon, royalist) cock into prostrate abasement. The Idée Napoleon blazes in public fireworks. No. 10. There follows an addendum historically preceding the Second Empire, the dispatch in July 1849 by the prince-president of troops to crush the nascent revolutionary Roman Republic, and restore the rabidly counterrevolutionary pope, Pius IX. This rouses the French Republicans against him and Catholics to his side. Having shown his military muscle abroad, Louis improves his chances at the plebiscite of December 1851, which will be attended by much coercion and killing of opponents—as seen by Sears, all the fallen are civilians, including women and children, with arrest and exile for all suspected of “Patriotism.” Daumier’s Napoleonic thug Ratapoil is at work, the symbolic figure (well known in print then if not in the sculpture admired today) enforcing the process by which the immense majority of 7,439,219 votes for Empire was extracted by “the steel [bayonetted] pen.” No. 11. In the second finale Diogenes, the cynic philosopher in person, in his titular role, is the “ONE dissentient” among the press to shed light on the true nature of events. Louis Napoleon, ally in the Crimean war as he may be, deserves “Impeachment” just like Louis-Philippe, as shown in No. 6. The final, half-page vignette is dominated by the eagle sheltering and dwarfing the new emperor (from 1852) who, laurel-crowned and imperially robed, seems to turn his back on the triumphal marching throngs of banner-waving, trumpeting citizenry-cum-military. The fanciful prediction of Louispetit bringing the magazine to sales of a million a week may reflect some rise in circulation, and a note appended to the eleventh episode promises further developments to the story. This responds to a real need, since “the English people appeared to be blindly adoring of Louis Napoleon,” and the French in their folly encouraging his despotism. As a true self-declared friend of the French nation, Diogenes fears that all

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this “glorious fraternization” (during the Crimean war) does not conduce either to French liberty or British interests. France was dragging out the costly war and outshining the British. An imperial visit to Britain took place just when Louispetit started, eliciting a series of anti-Louis jokes, of which the visit itself was the greatest. Did all this mockery not sit well with the public desperate to see the end of the war? Or was the magazine killed by some personal enemies, the “hateful knaves” in the words of the exit bow? (More on this below.)

Other War-Related Strips Just before the start of Louispetit, Diogenes ran a kind of prelude, a parody of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode scene 2 (cf. Fig. 3-13). We interpret this in sufficient detail above, in light of the marriage of (political) convenience to France, the human and financial waste, and concomitant postponement of reforms. The interminable Siege of Sebastopol, by far the bloodiest of the whole war, occasioned an immense cost in human life on both sides, mostly due to “improvement” in explosives, shells, cannonballs, and mines, to which another Diogenes strip, added at the very end, refers (pp. 180–81). The very title of Sears’s Mr Popkins Determines to Discover an Explosive Agent which Shall Put an End to War (July 14, 1855, p. 15) points to the ongoing war in the Crimea, using as a mock “schoolboy pyrotechnics” proxy the search for new explosives to be tested in the home and street. We see this in a juicy sequence of vignettes, with painful results: experiments on an artificial fortress, on a hat, with novel kitchen machinery, on a kettle loaded as an “infernal machine,” with an ignition device, all culminating in the desired explosion “with terrible effect” on cats, dogs, rats, and black beetles, a parrot and chimneys—enough to ruin the local trades, all down the street, as far as the soda-water factory, which suffers a sub-explosion.

At this point the promising journalistic venture of Phillips and Sears abruptly ends. The reference to an “infernal machine” summons up the attempted assassination of Louis Napoleon of April 1855, a couple of months before the strip started, in which the French implicated British connivance. Sensing perhaps the impending closure or precarious condition of the magazine, the artists of the remaining comic strips lose their drive. Inconsequentiality is the common denominator. Sears followed up not with more Louispetit as promised but a totally different, frivolous comic strip: Love’s Martyrdom as Exemplified by the Experience of the Rt. Hon. Capsicum Spoondle (pp. 182–85), run over the last four issues of the magazine, which ended on a Farewell. Sears, if not Watts Phillips was taken by surprise by the abrupt surrender, for he had intended to continue Love’s Martyrdom, left in suspense like Louispetit. Spoondle is the stereotypical unfortunate lover. Love-at-first-distant-sight is followed by a variety of tribulations: the seeking in vain, the sudden finding, the perilous aquatic pursuit, dreams of marriage, and the cruel joke which cries out for resolution, too late. Louispetit was clearly the pride of Diogenes, but the comic strip had come to the fore long before, from June 1853, on safe, nonpolitical topics. Watts Phillips’s How Mr T. Square Prepared his Picture for the Academy (pp. 186–88), in three parts, pages and issues, touches on familiar business. The fierce competition to decorate the new Houses of Parliament having abated by the mid1850s, painters fell back on the annual Royal Academy exhibitions, since long the most prized venue, and the most contested. Graphic art was excluded, but a multitude of complaints were general knowledge: accusations of favoritism, corruption and incompetence of juries, bad placement of pictures, too many portraits, and overcrowding of exhibits which ran to the thousands. Like Mr T. Square, artists sought out new subjects, thereby requiring new models, live or inanimate. Size of canvas came to mirror extent of ambition. Surviving

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fire and water, Mr T. Square’s huge canvas is too big to get out the door, so he cuts a corner off it. And more. The cab rushing to get his much-diminished submission in on time stumbles and crashes the picture, which is indeed “finished”—the story too? One wants more, but Watts Phillips, for all his sprightly drawing, montage, and freedom from credibility, has little stamina to develop this entertaining pileup of much ado about nothing. William McConnell’s How Mr Poppleton Weasel Enjoyed a Masquerade (pp. 189–90) followed soon after, in two episodes, also ending in an inconsequential defeat. The masquerade was a very French topic, honored by Poppleton in his final selection, after many absurdities of costume. That of a débardeur (stevedore, longshoreman) was the default costume so popular for the fancy French dress balls at the time, and familiar from caricature. Too fat to find a dancing partner, Poppleton gets arbitrarily into a fight with a man dressed as a devil. Apart from the comic strips, Diogenes ran three picture stories in larger half-page scenes: Sears’s Mrs Marigold and her Marrying Daughters occupied six issues with a tamely humorous account of a mother’s attempts to marry off elder daughters, keeping

back the younger and prettier, a familiar topos at the time (p. 192); William McConnell’s The Precocities of Master Springle, has five episodes about a child artist who sets up a mock trial in his school (p. 191) and plays at Volunteerism, dentistry, and soldiering. Watts Phillips’s eight-part The History of our Baby (his own?) is awful, followed and redeemed by the much better topic Pleas for the Persecuted, a nonnarrative seven-strong series exposing, among other social wrongs, the hypocrisy and tyranny of mistresses, and the travails of their servants. The fourth installment of Love’s Martyrdom was the last, and it was placed above the sad Farewell to the Public, where Diogenes good-humoredly surrenders his pen to Punch, which it had imitated in cover and design, if not in politics. Diogenes remained proud of its espousal of peace and of having exposed “the cuckoo in the nest of France,” humbug and quackery in and out of Parliament and the army, defended the “ignorant” classes, and having taken on “Davidian-like, the giant Times.” It seems that Diogenes’s policies aroused rancorous enemies who may have hastened its demise: “We know, since knaves with matchless spleen, / Have told us how they hate us.”

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Pl. 6-1-1 to Pl. 6-1-4. henry g. hine, “the Flight of louis Philippe,” The Puppet Show, nos. 1–3, 18 March f., 1848, pp. 4, 5, 13, and 21. T H E F L I G H T O F LO U I S - P H I L I P P E , i n P U P P E T S H OW , a n d LO U I S P E T I T A N D H I S B I R D i n D I O G E N E S     1 6 5

Pl. 6-1-2. henry g. hine, “the Flight of louis Philippe.”

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Pl. 6-1-3. henry g. hine, “the Flight of louis Philippe.”

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Pl. 6-1-4. henry g. hine, “the Flight of louis Philippe.”

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Pl. 6-2-1 to Pl. 6-2-11. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird! a history more wonderful than ‘whittington and his cat’” 11 parts, Diogenes, July–September 1855, nos. 120–130. T H E F L I G H T O F LO U I S - P H I L I P P E , i n P U P P E T S H OW , a n d LO U I S P E T I T A N D H I S B I R D i n D I O G E N E S     1 6 9

Pl. 6-2-2. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 2.

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Pl. 6-2-3. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 3.

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Pl. 6-2-4. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 4.

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Pl. 6-2-5. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 5.

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Pl. 6-2-6. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 6.

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Pl. 6-2-7. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 7.

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Pl. 6-2-8. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 8.

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Pl. 6-2-9. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 9.

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Pl. 6-2-10. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 10.

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Pl. 6-2-11. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “louispetit and his Bird!” no. 11.

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Pl. 6-3-1 & Pl. 6-3-2. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “Mr Popkins determines to discover an explosive agent which shall put an end to the war,” 2 parts, Diogenes, July 7 and 14, 1855, nos. 132 and 133. 1 8 0     T H E F L I G H T O F LO U I S - P H I L I P P E , i n P U P P E T S H OW , a n d LO U I S P E T I T A N D H I S B I R D i n D I O G E N E S

Pl. 6-3-2. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “Mr Popkins determines to discover an explosive agent which shall put an end to the war,” no. 2. T H E F L I G H T O F LO U I S - P H I L I P P E , i n P U P P E T S H OW , a n d LO U I S P E T I T A N D H I S B I R D i n D I O G E N E S     1 8 1

Pl. 6-4-1 to Pl. 6-4-4. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “love’s Martyrdom: as exemplified by the experience of the hon. capsicum Spoondle,” 4 parts, Diogenes, July 7, 14, 21, and 28, 1855. 1 8 2     T H E F L I G H T O F LO U I S - P H I L I P P E , i n P U P P E T S H OW , a n d LO U I S P E T I T A N D H I S B I R D i n D I O G E N E S

Pl. 6-4-2. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “love’s Martyrdom,” no. 2.

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Pl. 6-4-3. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “love’s Martyrdom,” no. 3.

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Pl. 6-4-4. watts Phillips and Matthew Sears, “love’s Martyrdom,” no. 4.

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Pl. 6-5-1 to Pl. 6-5-3. watts Phillips, “how Mr t. Square prepared his Picture for the academy,” 3 parts, Diogenes, June 11, 18, and 25, 1853, nos. 24–26. 1 8 6     T H E F L I G H T O F LO U I S - P H I L I P P E , i n P U P P E T S H OW , a n d LO U I S P E T I T A N D H I S B I R D i n D I O G E N E S

Pl. 6-5-2. watts Phillips, “how Mr t. Square prepared his Picture for the academy,” no. ii.

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Pl. 6-5-3. watts Phillips, “how Mr t. Square prepared his Picture for the academy,” no. iii.

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Pl. 6-6-1 & Pl. 6-6-2. william Mcconnell, “how Mr Poppleton weasel enjoyed a Masquerade,” Diogenes, 2 parts, July 23 and 30, 1853, no. 29 and 30. T H E F L I G H T O F LO U I S - P H I L I P P E , i n P U P P E T S H OW , a n d LO U I S P E T I T A N D H I S B I R D i n D I O G E N E S     1 8 9

Pl. 6-6-2. william Mcconnell, “how Mr Poppleton weasel enjoyed a Masquerade,” no. 2.

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Pl. 6-7. william Mcconnell, “the Precocities of Master Springle,” no. 2 of series of six, Diogenes, May 7, 1853, p. 206.

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Pl. 6-8. Matthew Sears, “Mrs Marigold and her ‘Marrying daughters,’” no. ii of series of six, May–June 1854, Diogenes, May 13, 1854, p. 204.

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Pl. 6-9. “elocutionary exercises of an ‘honourable member’ during the recess.” Diogenes, (September) 1853, no. 37, p. 130. (signed with owl = charles Bennett?)

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Chapter 7

JOHN LEECH AND MR. BRIGGS

J

ohn Leech was virtually a founding member of the Punch staff, having joined as of the fourth number, in August 1841. More or less selftaught, he was nonetheless well trained in anatomical illustration. He had been a medical student with his good friend Albert Smith, whom he brought to Punch before Smith left to edit The Man in the Moon. Leech quickly established himself as the artistic backbone of Punch, as Jerrold was on the literary side. For readers, Leech was Punch’s most popular figure, better known and loved than any writer, according to Thackeray, Punch’s star writer, in 1854.1 He thought Punch owed more to Leech than Leech to Punch. Over a twenty-year career there, Leech contributed to Punch an estimated minimum of 3,000 drawings including 600 big cut cartoons; the “best-known artist of his day,” he is credited with having “taken the whole comic press in a new direction.” With Dickens and Thackeray, Leech was considered one of the three greatest humorists of the age.2 He was the great humanizer of comic invention, light in his humor, polished in manner, and never rude like his predecessors. His work was, unlike that of the French, pure, asexual, and, according to a contemporary Punch editor, “untainted by the humours of Gavarni or the drolleries of Cham.” Yet Leech was the graphic artist most admired and honored by the French, perhaps because he was the “very first Englishman who had made beauty a part of his art.”3 There are strong links between Leech and French caricature. Leech’s principal recent biographer, Simon Houfe, has considerable material on this, and thinks that Leech must have had a “Parisian instructor”: none other than Cham, whom he is documented having met at Thackeray’s house in London with great enthusiasm early on, in 1843. Leech must also

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Fig. 7-1. a la Mémoire de John leech. “hommage des Journaux comiques Français” (after Frith, Leech).

have met “that other Parisian giant,” Gavarni, during the latter’s years in London, and later Eduard Manet, with whom he exchanged sketches. Leech’s captions, too, were admired in France, his “fragments of dialogue in the manner of Cham or Gavarni.” Manet’s major works of the 1860s show similarities with Leech’s subjects; similarly, French caricaturist Eduard Riou, who also worked for the English press, did drawings and pastiches inspired by Leech.4

The French critic Augustin Filon credits Leech as having rescued caricature from the “discredit” into which it had fallen in the age of Gillray and Rowlandson, to become “more in harmony with the needs and tendencies of the new generations.” He turned the old “allegory and vulgarity” of caricature to “reality and decency.” This is true of his comic strips as it is of his single drawings. The most comprehensive tribute, from a leading Punch political

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cartoonist and near-contemporary, is that of Linley Sambourne: Leech was “by far the ablest ‘all around’ delineator of a force and character the century has produced . . . No one before or since has had such a natural and unstrained grasp of character.”5 All this admiration was for his graphic style; his captions, little regarded today, were deemed by at least one critic “models of literary pith . . . as happy as the drawings.”6 Leech came to Punch with ample experience. In the 1830s he was busy with albums and journals of various kinds, such as comic Grammars (Latin and English) and small cuts in Bell’s Life in London. While Leech’s half dozen picture stories are only a small segment in his immense oeuvre in Punch, it is worth asking where he got the idea for the new genre (as opposed to his usual single cartoons) and why he started using it at this moment, for Punch, in 1849. He cannot have failed to notice that in early 1847 his old friend the ex-Punch writer Albert Smith and his former Punch colleague the artist Henry George Hine collaborated on a dazzling series of French-inspired true comic strips in The Man in the Moon (see chapter 2). Punch, already accused of plagiarism, was not about to imitate the high jinks exhibited there, even if the lunar farce had been to its taste anyway. But Leech, prompted we surmise by Smith, could offer another kind of narrative by stringing together his familiar domestic cartoons. We have seen that it was Francophile Thackeray who introduced Leech and Doyle to Cham, Le Charivari’s new star. Like the Charivari artists, Leech certainly knew the value of playing upon reader expectations by running cartoons in conceptual or topical series such as Social Miseries, Physiologies (from January 1847), and Enfants Terribles (precocious youngsters). Leech’s Domestic Bliss (1847) series is surely inspired by Daumier’s Moeurs Conjugales (conjugal customs)—without the sex. The use of numbering added to the sense of continuity. Leech’s Perfect Sincerity or Thinkings Aloud,

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another numbered series, ran concurrently with his Pleasures of Housekeeping which concern us here. Graphically Punch subsisted on the stand-alone social joke, of which Leech, over his twenty-year career for Punch, was the undisputed master. Never strong in the larger scale of figures needed for the weekly big cut, in this realm Leech never rose above the mediocre. John Tenniel rescued him from his miscasting in that role. Leech’s true forte, the single smaller cartoons featuring a casually recurrent repertoire of popular social types, are all in their way “physiologies” (the term is the same in French and English); his way of evoking recurrent situations, themes, and characters such as the crusty cabbie, the vain, pretentious soldier, the precocious child were incomparable. His range of jokes was such as to earn him, from Ruskin, the accolade of having covered “the entire scope of the English social scene.”7 Enthroned above them all, soon to become famous as the luckless huntsman par excellence, and the first social type to generate continuous narrative incidents, stands (or falls) the “immortal” Mr. Briggs.

Enter Mr. Briggs We must linger a while with Mr. Briggs. While not a household favorite like Dickens’s Sam Weller, he is regarded as the “first great comic character since Rowlandson’s Dr Syntax.”8 The recurrence of social types and situations familiar from the fiction of the era, and the persistence of popular named characters in successive novels, as in Trollope, was useful in a periodical like Punch, which unlike other journals did not depend on serialized narrative fiction. Unlike the Charivari, the Punch format, with its one big weekly, always changing topical-political cut, had to run its series in smaller designs. We have visited Punch’s first really extensive series, Doyle’s Manners and Customs of the Englyshe. Starting in March 1849 this reached its seventh installment in May, with (as it happened) an equestrian subject, in

the same issue that introduced Leech’s long-enduring Mr. Briggs by name, as the victim of insulting graffiti scribbled by street urchins on the grand gates of his so-called Oriental Lodge (p. 207). The use of a personal name, chosen more or less at random (or remembered perhaps from Vanity Fair), is easily explained: it was needed to give spice and verisimilitude to the street urchins’ naughty prank. (These “rude boys” could well have been trespassing into a guarded and gated community, for which they would be punished, quite apart from the graffiti.)9 I believe the Briggs character name was initially not intended to be reused. At this stage Leech had not yet thought of devising a continuous narrative with a Mr. Briggs as protagonist. The idea of repetition of the running title, and reuse of Briggs as a name, occurred only months later (in April), with a new plot point unrelated to the graffiti episode. Graffiti are the least of Briggs’s problems, foreshadowing much worse damage to the domestic fabric: the prospect of having to fix the roof, as he promises his maid, the first victim of the leak. In the next vignette, below (the two designs occupy a full page), the builders arrive, and the “first step is taken towards making things comfortable” (I stress the ominous word). This is a pledge of commitment, and a nice cliff-hanger for readers. Was there an internal spur to the novelty of this development? I am tempted to believe that the spur may be sought in the apparent success of Doyle’s Manners and Customs. The momentum of this series in its distinctive child-like style may have given Leech pause to wonder at the popular success of his young rival and whether he could not try something new: a credible chronological narrative continuity. Leech had at this time his own building problems, which may be reflected in his Pleasures of Housekeeping—The Loose Slate run in six stages from April to June 1849 (pp. 207–12), thus slowly, over months, as befits such a household task.10 It all starts innocently, with a loose slate leaking into the maid’s bedroom. Labor and equipment are brought

in. Next week a dozen cheerfully convivial Irishmen, variously active from scaffold to roof, arrive early on the job, as Briggs, wakened by their noise at 5 a.m., watches from his window. This representation of labor, and Irish labor at that, like the story as a whole, is exceptional: positive views of the Irish, as of the laboring classes generally, whatever their social value are exceptional in Punch, which was generally given to racist contempt for Irish poverty and discontent, and to ignoring the devastating potato famine which may have sent these laborers to seek work in England. They are not to blame moreover for the chaos that ensues. Up on the roof with his builder-contractor, Briggs is rashly persuaded to do a thorough rebuilding, for which (next week) the parlor indoors is totally destroyed with the moving of a wall—which causes him to try to enter the building through a parlor window, which causes him to be arrested as a burglar (Leech tells us this actually happened to him once).11 Next (week) Briggs finds the chimneys are all wrong, needing replacements resembling exotic abstract sculpture. (Initially I thought these were comic, artistic fancy; now I wonder whether they do not code a sinister reference to the labyrinthine twists of real chimneys under and above the roof, which often tortured and even killed the child chimney sweeps condemned to clean them.) This commonplace domestic misery, unusual in its narrative development, looks forward rather exactly—chaos escalating from an attempted minor repair—to the fate of a series of householders in J. S. Sullivan’s British Workman (or British Working Man), an extended narrative series in Judy 1878, where an attempt to fix slates starts an avalanche of “improvements,” each of which undoes the last.12 This same complaint thirty years after Briggs’s (or even today) need not surprise us. The continuous building and rebuilding of London throughout the nineteenth century invited shortcuts, shoddiness, and incompetence, with little legal oversight, despite parliamentary attempts at control.

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Briggs on Horseback Mr. Briggs’s mishaps are not however over. In an awkward attempt at dénouement designed to bring him to what will prove his true métier, the hunt, the rebuilding sequence peters out on a huge bill from the builder, which weakens the owner to the point that his doctor recommends some exercise on horseback. A view of Briggs as foolish in acquiring and riding a horse as he is at fixing a loose slate leads to a finale where out of control on a mount that bolts at the sight of an omnibus, he terrifies a passing woman and children. This is printed as it happens opposite Doyle’s Dream of Peace (p. 83), with its verse commentary underneath the Leech drawing. Happy Britain has to suffer only such little social disturbances. The route to the world of hunting passes through more travails, under a title amended by one letter to Pleasures of Horsekeeping, where Briggs changes his mount for one which “don’t go fallin’ about,” to another (“at an alarming sacrifice”), a “clever cob— up to great weight [Briggs is fat]—and that a child might ride” (pp. 213–14). The alternate mount elicits five perfectly contradictory opinions from each of five friends. Shifting gears again, to the need for a new stable boy to “look after his horse,” Briggs interviews a crowd of unsavory, nondescript characters, young and old. At this point (at which our reproductions end) Briggs disappears for a few months, preparatory to the hunting season as it were, until the moment when having ordered new riding boots, he faces a wifely prohibition.13 Abandoning continuity, Leech next has Briggs falling out of a horse-drawn bathing machine. This episode appeared after a two-month gap, the return of Briggs being explicitly prompted by the concern of “numerous Correspondents,” and more particularly the “Cork Gentleman,” in order to explain Briggs’s absence, which had evidently been widely noticed. The caption tells us it was due to his departure to the seaside. Is Briggs already so popular

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that his absences are a matter of complaint? His next adventure is announced in advance, and in the hunting field, at last.14 Watch out for him, we are told. Two weeks later Mr. Briggs and his special boots are ready. But once again the protagonist, who is clearly not poor, again makes a bad choice of mount, a circus horse this time, and the following week sacrifices his hunting cap, thrown by his angry wife into the fire. (We will see little more of her.) The manifold ways that Briggs, at this early stage of his career, is frustrated in his cynegetic ambitions, is best rendered by short descriptions of each episode in which he figures. (See inset below.) Disjunct and various as they are, the single cartoon episodes explain why Leech preferred them, at this point, to developing some real equine narratives: better a panoply of mishaps in different contexts, which mirror the extraordinary variety of the settings. There was a negative example in Richard Doyle, who having ended his Manners and Customs, started a new series, this time in narrative form, called Pleasure Trips of Brown, Jones and Robinson, which was interspersed with Leech’s Briggs cartoons, but in a format Leech considered uninviting: numerous small drawings filling the page and leaving no room for the artist’s affinity for landscape and atmospheric effects. After the closure of Briggs’s horse-keeping difficulties, which carried readers into most of the second half of 1849, and not counting a few nonBriggs hunting pictures interspersed, there were seven Briggs cartoons, now disjunct, followed by thirteen spread unevenly through 1850. As we have seen, Doyle, a kind of rival in narrative as he was in the big cut he shared with his older colleague, quit in November, offended by Leech’s antipapal big cuts. Perhaps surprisingly, Briggs does not visit the Great Exhibition of summer 1851, which Punch faithfully attended, but Leech has him otherwise busy on his horse in eleven more equine-related episodes. We may leave Leech at this high point in his hunting career, with a caption giving us another

unusual direct editorial response to the reader: “in answer to numerous inquiries we are happy to say, that Mr. Briggs is quite well [he had been absent only three weeks], and at Brighton” where he is teaching his family to ride. “We should not wonder if he went out with the Harriers in a day or two”; that is, “to be continued.” So it transpired the next week in two designs that show Mr. Briggs walking his steed painfully up difficult terrain. That was the end for a while. In the following years Briggs remained absent, yielding to Leech’s usual mix of urban and family cartoons. Only the sensational exhibitions of horse taming by the American John Rarey, whom we today call a “horse-whisperer,” and who demonstrated his “secret” art before a delighted Queen Victoria in the spring of 1858, brought “our dear old friend Briggs” back to the stable to try his luck. We see him in four successive drawings, where the necessary whispering magic fails him, of course. Our inset below is sufficient to show how Leech in Punch wants to expose his continuing popular character, horsey as he basically is, to a variety of social contexts in which the riding to hounds is incidental. From this list we can judge how much of Briggs’s trouble with horses, like those on which the house-/horse-keeping story draws to an end, does not involve the actual hunting process at all—such is indeed the tally of almost all drawings about Briggs, not counting the bird and fish episodes. The exploits of Mr. Briggs were kept alive by reprints in collections of his drawings starting in the 1860s. Another index of the popularity of “the immortal Briggs” with a nod toward his origins, came on November 14, 1851, in another medium, when he trod—and rode—the stage in a theater specialized in equestrian drama. Horse and rider followed a grand dramatic equestrian spectacle entitled The Maid of Saragossa, which realized a “Celebrated Picture” by Sir David Wilkie, the same horse passing from romance to high comedy. The spectacle was described as embodying “Sketches Furnished from PUNCH’S

domicile, Fleet Street, a New, Grand, Locomotive, Pedestrian, Equestrian, Go-ahead Extravaganza entitled, Mr. BRIGGS! Or, House Keeping versus Horse Keeping15

One assumes that the emphasis on stage was on Briggs’s failures, which obviously made for good comic business and farcical action. Did these include what must be accounted the stupidest and most dangerous (and least credible) of his exploits, his riding, when drunk, his horse over the dining-room table, as depicted in a cartoon of January 1851? Had Leech seen or heard of this in some misbegotten circus act? One hopes not, for the horse’s sake. As a respite from so many equestrian failures there appeared in April of that year a short narrative called Briggs Rides his Match (pp. 215–16). This is carried through eleven drawings much smaller than before, unevenly over three pages of one issue (combined here). Leech’s little hero seems confident enough to test himself in a competitive race. After one good jump, and mistaking the prescribed route, Briggs suffers a series of mishaps, ending thoroughly dunked in a dirty brook. Most improbably, he wins the race, dripping wet, to a cheering crowd. Maybe this is a moral victory, for sheer pertinacity. Nevertheless, Briggs was dropped from the Leech team until a single appearance in the Almanack for 1852, and on a hint of public complaint at his absence, another single appearance in January 1853 of Briggs seasick, to the caption “Oh dear no! Old Br-ggs is not dead—he has taken to yachting for the benefit of his health.” Why the transparent incognito of the name Br-ggs? The regular dose of incompetent or distressed huntsmen continues with the occasional, non-reappearing proper names, all of them plebeian: Tomkins, Bungle, Chubb, Hackle, Todgers, Muff. And then—Tom Noddy.

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Briggs in Punch 1849–185116 1849: Briggs buys a circus horse, which sits down in the street whenever the band plays. his furious wife throws B’s hunting cap into fire (thackeray particularly admired this). in a steeplechase, B dares to leap a foot-wide brook. in evening gloom B loses his horse in desolate country. a dealer offers to buy B’s horse for horsemeat by the pound. 1850: B’s horse is recovered from cold, but a long frost sets in. B almost frightened to death by his shot at a pheasant exploding like a very large firework. B’s horse uncontrollable in street. B prefers to open rather than jump gate. B angers a Protectionist (of countryside) by wanting to pass through a break in a fence. two hundred small urchins “take care” of (i.e., tease) B’s horse in the absence of the owner, away at the exhibition. B upsets vendors’ carts while driving friends “quietly” to derby races. 1850: “our friend Briggs” practices throwing a fishing line from a billiard table, catching curtain and movable decorations. Fishing from a punt, B gets stuck. Fishing in driving rain, B fails to catch a perch. his borrowed hunting dog disturbs his sleep by howling. Scared by a fish he has caught “which flies at him like a dog,” B buys the brush (prize tail) of a fox which he has not earned. 1851: B tries to ride his horse over a dining-room table, which collapses. hiding or trapped in a thicket, B is besieged by a circle of rabbits. B nervously checks out steeple-chase jumps in advance. [Mr. Briggs Rides his Match.] B gets drunk at hampton races, so ashamed that his name has to be spelled Br-ggS in Punch “for various reasons.” 1851: Fails to catch fish. Shooting grouse in Scotland, B boasts he is a Scot. B exhausted on rugged Scottish grouse moors. off again shooting, B causes chaos at railway station with his dogs. B loads his gun dangerously wrong. gunpowder for pheasant shooting is served up to B’s family dinner. B teaching family to ride at Brighton (see our text above). B walks his horse over difficult terrain.

More Hunting and Some Fishing In the early 1850s Leech was obsessed by Bloomerism, a nascent feminist movement touched by the US antislavery campaign, named after American Amelia Jenks Bloomer. The much-feared reversion of female to male attire and social gender roles, lambasted by Daumier in the Charivari, seems tedious and

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mechanical in Punch, but testified to the ongoing popular fear of a feminism burgeoning especially in the United States. In 1853 Leech brought on another popular misogynistic series, “Servantgalism, or What’s to Become of the Missusses,” numbered without continuity of character but keeping the same theme of uppity servants. (During this era servants were a huge and much-exploited social

sector in Britain—one in five Londoners was a servant.) Eighteen fifty-three was also the year of Tenniel’s Big Game hunting stories, which must have seemed a welcome exotic after Leech’s familiar domestic repertoire of fox hunters, cabbies, porters, street urchins, precocious brats, mockery of the mustache movement and extreme collars. The old favorite equestrian Briggs came back to life under a new name: Tom Noddy’s First Day with the Hounds after the Long Frost (pp. 217–20), making just one, fairly extensive narrative appearance in seventeen drawings spread over three of four successive issues. Noddy is yet another incompetent horseman who, chasing a fox, twice loses his seat, then his whip, his cigar, and finally his skittish horse, which is brought back to him by a local yokel. Never as popular as Briggs, Noddy returns very occasionally, once only in 1855 (in four scenes) and once in the Almanack for 1856, as “Our Friend Tom Noddy” together with a “Mr. Briggs Salmon Fishing.” If Briggs was up to a point an alter ego for the artist, there is autobiography also in the creation of Noddy, modeled, according to painter and biographer William Powell Frith, on Leech’s friend and hunting companion Mike Halliday. The latter had been a clerk in the House of Lords who became a successful amateur artist often exhibiting at the Royal Academy. Halliday was slightly lame (which Leech does not show) and is decribed by Frith as of “elf-like quaintness.” He also appeared in Punch under other names and was known for wearing the (graphic) darts thrown at him “proudly as decorations,” exhibiting them on the walls of his studio.17 Painter W. P. Frith, like premier Punch biographer M. H. Spielmann, was much taken with Tom Noddy.18 Like Leech, Frith was a significant figure in the turn of British art toward social realism, and a close friend, and he may have encouraged the cartoonist to take Briggs from hunting to another popular rural pastime, fishing. Mr. Briggs Has a Day’s Salmon-Fishing (pp. 221–23) is closely autobiographical, but lacks all physical similarity to the

author: Briggs is portrayed as short, fat, and facially nondescript; Leech was tall, slim, and handsome. On horseback the similarity was one of proficiency, or lack of it. As a fisherman Leech claimed more expertise for himself than he allowed Briggs, who proves as ill-suited to the task as ever. In the short, six-scene episode Briggs goes in expectation of easy catch in a salmon-rich Highland river, but is shown struggling to hold a fish (invisible off stage), which threatens to tip him into the water or onto sharp rocks. This corresponds exactly to a tale told by pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, who had invited Leech up to Perthshire: “just below the dyke at Stanley the line suddenly straightened, and away went a clean-run 25 pounder with a hook in its gills! Then the struggle began . . . and Leech scrambled out amongst the rocks and stones of the Stoball shore, and the fish making straight down stream, dragged him helter-skelter over boulders and through bushes, till he was nearly at his last gasp . . . [ultimately, after half an hour] my father gaffed the fish [i.e., hooked it with a pole, scene 5-6], to the great delight of ‘Mr. Briggs’ as subsequently portrayed in Punch.” Specific fishing spots in the Highlands became “sacred to the memory of Briggs.”19 The same source tells how after the “magnificent landscape and splendid elements of this sport” had lured him into dreamy reverie (cf. scene 2 of the deer-shooting episode, p. 225), Leech wandered quite unknowingly into a private deer drive of the Duke of Athol, to find himself face to face with the duke, who “absolutely furious, shouted at him at the top of his voice and swore at him in Scottish.” Terrified, Leech fled, but (supposedly) immortalized the whole scene in a cartoon in Punch 1850 (sic), captioned “A Scotch dog in a manger,” and showing the dog as “savage and glaring.” Around 1857, Millais and Leech were again in Perthshire, this time invited to accompany the duke on a deer drive. “Alone with Leech in a butt he suddenly put a pistol to Leech’s head and said that now he had him at his mercy. Leech was so terrified that he missed his shot!” A

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great incident for another cartoon, or even a narrative sequence, but the circumstances were now quite different, and Leech was not about to put the duke in a compromising situation again, having found him a forgiving and delightful host.20 Penitent, Leech vowed never to use a known real-life personality in a cartoon again, and rejected suggestions for incidents that seemed to do so. Like Tenniel’s Peter Piper, Briggs accidentally kills his prey and returns home (per caption) in triumph—although depicted as cold, wet, and very untriumphal-looking. Elements of this account enter the climax of Briggs’s career in the Almanack for 1861 (pp. 224–30). (Almanacks sold especially well, reaching 165,000 in this decade.) The condensing of Briggs’s experience, his longest and virtually last, in thirteen large vignettes over seven pages, comprises the bulk of Punch’s popular annual supplement. This is a well-chosen envoi enhanced by its visual synthesis, rather than being spread over several issues. From his Scottish salmon fishing and English fox hunting, Briggs rises to the aristocratic sport of deer stalking. His initiation consists of learning to wait, having the deer driven toward him, falling asleep, being too astonished to fire upon the Monarch of the Glen (the title of an instantly and enduringly famous 1851 picture by Landseer), missing easy shots even when face to face with the animal, surviving terrible weather and conditions, and accidentally killing a stag. For which exploit his face, which never showed a happy moment, gets bloodied according to custom. Despite all, he rides home in triumph. Given enough technical assistance, money, and supportive friends, anyone can excel as a sportsman (Tenniel’s Peter Piper would have agreed). The hunting field was in some sense the alternative home for the Englishman, and many a wife like Briggs’s deplored the husband’s neglect of the domestic hearth and family for his cynegetic passions. The pleasures and little triumphs of the hunt compensated the male for failures elsewhere. There were class issues, as seen in the Athol incident. But

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the hunt allowed for a certain social fluidity. Lower urban classes, gaining financial stability, and ambition, joined the upper and rural classes in a hunting field expanding like the readership of Punch. For the desk-bound clerk, hunting was a healthy reprieve from sedentary labor. The hunting field also offered the whiff of danger and the sensation of control lacking in humdrum bureaucratic life. Amid all the accidents, all the falling into ditches and over fences, in Leech no one gets seriously hurt (unlike in Trollope)—much less killed. In his drawings Leech portrayed both hunt and home equally; whether in the role of huntsman or paterfamilias, the goal in both domains was above all, control; the comedy was in its impossibility. The inability to meet the challenge of “true” masculinity is the secret of the humor and raison d’être of innumerable cartoons beyond Leech and his imitators, including those of Keene’s Volunteers. In the field the huntsman is simply incompetent and accident-prone, in the family living room he cannot maintain discipline. (The male’s subjection to his wife reaches an extreme form of perpetual humiliation in Douglas Jerrold’s chronicle of hugely, dreadfully popular misogynistic “Mrs Caudle’s Curtain lectures.”) Horses are meant to obey. Briggs’s do not. They are like children, another favorite of Leech in life and art—uncontrollable, willful, impulsive—and funny because they reveal awkward truths. Horses are also (per Punch) like women—beautiful maybe, but difficult to dominate and unreliably skittish. Horse, child, wife, servants—all are natural anarchists, defying that social control which is the basis of “civilization.” Hunting was very masculine, very British, the national sport, and the horse was paraded as a national subject for art as the sportsman was for fiction. Hunting was the best experience for the legislator, according to Disraeli.21 If Briggs was partly a self-portrait and partly an everyman, he sums up an old history of cockney sportsmen culminating in the novels of Robert Surtees. This popular author

wanted to use Briggs in his novels, but Leech declined, seeking control of his creation. Briggs is not (from his speech) a cockney like Surtees’s Jorrocks, but his name is plebeian, his origins are like many of his readers lower-middle class, happy to join (even if only vicariously) an essentially upper-middle-class, or aristocratic and rural pastime. Leech’s own insecurity on horseback may be judged by his frequent requests, when he had to borrow from his host a mount, that it be tractable and docile, and not “high-spirited.” His level of skill on horseback was disputed; was he really “a better horseman than his modesty [allowed],” or was he “no rider”?22 Briggs is out to hunt the elusive fox. Fox hunting up to mid-century was an expensive, “elaborate, ritualistic and exclusive cult,” a national institution, not a hobby.23 In the 1840s it was at the height of its social preeminence, but its exclusiveness when Leech put it in his cartoons was leavened by the participation of lower-middle classes, good-natured, commonsensical but common-or-garden tradesmen and artisans. A staple of the Leech hunting cartoon was the impudent cockney sportsman unafraid to engage a lord in conversation, and given to dropping his aitches—which carried more social stigma than dropping a whip, it seems. On the other side of the fence (so to speak) was the peasant urchin given to mocking the plight of his elders and betters. The hunting field was a prime arena for the social struggle and social climbing embraced by those who were not, like higher classes, brought up to ride from childhood. The struggle was apparent in the home too, preeminently involving the servants, who drop their aitches too—but not their “uppity” pretensions. Leech himself rose from a lower class to be universally accepted and described as a “gentleman” and “gentlemanly” in his social behavior with the appearance and manners of that class. He grew with Punch and Punch with him: once-radical sympathies morphing into open disdain for the lower orders. Leech’s favorite author, Surtees, positively enthroned the cockney hero of his (first) hunting

novel, Handley Cross or, Mr Jorrocks Hunt (1854), in which the decidedly vulgar and unscrupulous former grocer and tea merchant Jorrocks, incapable as he is of correctly writing a formal letter (writing wot for what, for instance), is popular enough to be elected Master of Fox Hounds. The preface predicts that his “longevity” will be due to the novel’s illustrations by Leech.

Money Makes the Man? Leech was a self-made man in an epoch that allowed for much social mobility. Ubiquitous as he was professionally, he was often pressed for money; excessively generous, he nonetheless died rich. He was prolific, hard working, well paid (six to ten guineas or over four hundred pounds today, per drawing). He lived comfortably, changed houses frequently, and could afford to hunt. His family, starting with his own father who outlived him, was a heavy burden on him, causing him to borrow heavily from his publisher. He was reputed to have earned £40,000 from Punch alone, in addition to illustrations to books and the proceeds from a very successful exhibition in 1862 of oil sketches enlarged from his cartoons. (A single item sold for up to 112 guineas, the total of the 656 items on sale reaching £7,000.) And yet, at the end of his workaholic life, which ended prematurely at age forty-six, his friends were agitating on his behalf for a state pension. Small amounts were granted to his widow and two surviving children.24 Leech’s vulnerability in money matters, his openness to exploitation, may lie behind the denunciation in one of his last comic strips with its twenty-three small scenes compressed onto two facing pages, not at all his familiar larger-scene format. It was a true comic strip called L. S. D. Money Makes the Man (LSD = Pounds Shillings Pence, pp. 231–32). Likely deemed unsuitable for Punch, Leech took it to another magazine, the short-lived Town Talk of

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Fig. 7-2. george Bouverie goddard, “it is off with the old love, and on with the new,” Punch, March 31, 1866.

1858, which issued a sixpenny, Christmas “LSD City Number,” eight pages about the money mania. Here the Leech contribution (though signed) remained unnoticed and is omitted in all bibliographies. He chose this outlet perhaps because as a bitter social satire the subject-matter, albeit one of universal complaint, lay outside his usual artistic concerns, as well as those of Punch, which wanted to avoid offending the moneyed classes. Town Talk was a logical choice for Leech, who may have noticed its openness to pictorial narrative, the publication having just started the immense Wilderspin series (p. 346). In Leech’s strip Mr Timothy Moneyspinner, a noisy brat from birth, is soon given to fraud both financial (“kite-flying”) and commercial (diluting beer?). Moneyspinner is a fox to the public geese, a gambling cheat and scofflaw—but he matures into portly respectability.

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Heartless toward the poor whom he exploits, he rises to councilman and alderman, enriching himself as wine merchant and moneylender. Having married his daughter to a wizened, decrepit old lord, he ultimately realizes his final ambition, becoming Lord Mayor the better to punish unfortunates. He dies leaving “a considerable balance at his banker’s” and his ugly face on a marble bust at the Mansion House. There was another reason the designs—or one of them—were not suited to Punch: vignette no. 7 shows mermaids risking revelation of a minutely rendered bare breast-and-nipple: they stand for the temptations of the flesh to which Mr Moneyspinner was immune. For the theme of filthy lucre, so commonplace in fiction of the era, Leech would have remembered particularly Douglas Jerrold’s A Man Made of Money (1849), issued by Punch publishers

Fig. 7-3. John leech, “a trying thing for tootles,” Punch, February 20, 1858.

Bradbury and Evans, to which Leech had contributed twelve illustrations. The title of the novel, which is written with some panache and as a fantastical kind of capitalist fairy tale, is to be taken literally, for Solomon Jericho finds that when fortune falls upon him, “like a disease, withering and corrupting him,” it turns out that the source of his wealth is supernaturally coded in his body, and as he uses it, his physical substance gradually wastes away. Timothy Moneyspinner was preceded in the same album by a dozen Leech drawings, a “handful of small change,” on the same theme: financial frauds, including a close-up portrait of the British Royal Banker as Mr Robert Macaire, Daumier’s notorious French imposter, “naturalized in England.” There was no lack of financial frauds in life and literature:

among the best known, Melmotte in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now lay in the future (1874–1875) but Dickens’s Mr Merdle in Little Dorrit lies very much in Timothy Moneyspinner’s present (1857–1858). Leech suffered personally from one particular peculiarity, a frequent butt of his cartoons, relating to a street phenomenon featured some years later by Du Maurier in his Philosopher’s Revenge (pp. 327–28). Leech suffered from a lifelong detestation of organ grinders and street noises generally (compare the common aversion to leaf blowers today), which became virtually pathological, and was said to have driven him into constant insomnia and worse. He once had to move due to intolerable noise, felt persecuted everywhere he went, seriously weakening an already fragile health, and toward the end he

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even complained that the noise was “driving him to suicide.” In 1854 he advocated that all organ grinders be drafted into the Crimean war. Du Maurier’s Philosopher’s Revenge puts an ironical spin on them, giving them a paradoxically positive use, but Leech’s phobic aversion was to a lesser degree shared by many including Mark Lemon and Dickens, who pressed successfully for a parliamentary bill to restrict the nuisance. After the premature death of Leech, who was widely mourned in Britain and France (see p. 195), the demand for hunting pictures was met, briefly, by the animal and sporting painter George Bouverie Goddard, and in the longer term (1866–1876) by Georgina Bowers, the first female cartoonist (in a non-caricatural style) to work for Punch. Not surprisingly we see in the hundreds of vignettes bearing her initials more female participation in the sport of hunting, often proving superiority on horseback while adeptly engaging in subtle flirting.25 Like Leech, Bowers’s huntswoman can be quite callous, leaving her old suitor fallen miserably into a muddy ditch, while she canters off to pursue a better match (pp. 204–5). This recalls occasional “feminist” variations Leech had touched upon at a time

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in mid-century, when the taboo against women on hunts was lifting thanks (in the 1860s) to the “safety skirt” and a specially designed sidesaddle. The clergy also benefited from this opening, lending a Christian aura to the sport. Leech, dying in 1864, was considered irreplaceable; with him, in comic strips if not cartoons, the rural hunt appeared to have run its course. What mattered now was the social hunt in the drawing room, a realm over which Du Maurier, who took over Leech’s seat at the Punch table, soon established himself the master. Punch did however accept a condemnation of the lust for riches, comparable to Leech’s, much later, for their Almanack of 1867, from newcomer Charles Bennett. The title is taken from Hogarth’s series Industry and Idleness, but the moral is reversed, with Idleness rewarded and Industry ruined (p. 233). The Idle boy never bothers to learn a trade, becomes rich bribing electors, and super-rich as a “contractor” for a railway company. The Industrious boy plods and plods, providing for his old age to discover that the railway shares in which he has invested his life earnings, and (apparently) in the same company speculation as the Idle boy, are worthless.

Pl. 7-1-1 to Pl. 7-1-6. John leech, “Pleasures of housekeeping,” Punch, v. xvi, (February) 1849, p. 64 (see n. 13, p. 441).

John leech and Mr. BriggS  207

Pl. 7-1-2. John leech, “Pleasures of housekeeping.”

208  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-1-3. John leech, “Pleasures of housekeeping.”

John leech and Mr. BriggS  209

Pl. 7-1-4. John leech, “Pleasures of housekeeping.”

210  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-1-5. John leech, “Pleasures of housekeeping.”

John leech and Mr. BriggS  211

Pl. 7-1-6. John leech, “Pleasures of housekeeping.”

212  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-2-1 to Pl. 7-2-2. John leech, “Pleasures of housekeeping,” Punch, v. xvi, (February) 1849, p. 64 (see n. 11).

John leech and Mr. BriggS  213

Pl. 7-2-2. John leech, “Pleasures of housekeeping.”

214  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-3-1 & Pl. 7-3-2. John leech, “Pleasures of horsekeeping / Mr Briggs rides his Match,” Punch, v. xx, (april) 1851, pp. 162 and 164.

John leech and Mr. BriggS  215

Pl. 7-3-2. John leech, “Pleasures of horsekeeping / Mr Briggs rides his Match.”

216  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-4-1 to Pl. 7-4-4. John leech, “tom noddy’s First day with the hounds after the long Frost,” Punch, v. xxviii, (March–april) 1855, pp. 100, 104, 120, 140. John leech and Mr. BriggS  217

Pl. 7-4-2. John leech, “tom noddy’s First day with the hounds after the long Frost.”

218  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-4-3. John leech, “tom noddy’s First day with the hounds after the long Frost.”

John leech and Mr. BriggS  219

Pl. 7-4-4. John leech, “tom noddy’s First day with the hounds after the long Frost.”

220  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-5-1 to Pl. 7-5-3. John leech, “Mr Briggs has a day’s Salmon Fishing,” Punch almanack for 1857, 3 pp.

John leech and Mr. BriggS  221

Pl. 7-5-2. John leech, “Mr Briggs has a day’s Salmon Fishing.”

222  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-5-3. John leech, “Mr Briggs has a day’s Salmon Fishing.”

John leech and Mr. BriggS  223

Pl. 7-6-1 to Pl. 7-6-7. John leech, “Mr BriggS, feeling that his heart is in the highlands . . .” Punch almanack for 1861, 7 pp.

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Pl. 7-6-2. John leech, “Mr BriggS, feeling that his heart is in the highlands . . .”

John leech and Mr. BriggS  225

Pl. 7-6-3. John leech, “Mr BriggS, feeling that his heart is in the highlands . . .”

226  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-6-4. John leech, “Mr BriggS, feeling that his heart is in the highlands . . .”

John leech and Mr. BriggS  227

Pl. 7-6-5. John leech, “Mr BriggS, feeling that his heart is in the highlands . . .”

228  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-6-6. John leech, “Mr BriggS, feeling that his heart is in the highlands . . .”

John leech and Mr. BriggS  229

Pl. 7-6-7. John leech, “Mr BriggS, feeling that his heart is in the highlands . . .”

230  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-7-1 & Pl. 7-7-2. John leech, “l.s.d. Money Makes the Man. the career of Mr timothy Moneyspinner,” Town Talk, christmas album, 1858, pp. 6–7. John leech and Mr. BriggS  231

Pl. 7-7-2. John leech, “l.s.d. Money Makes the Man. the career of Mr timothy Moneyspinner.”

232  John leech and Mr. BriggS

Pl. 7-8. charles Bennett, “the idle apprentice, the industrious apprentice,” Punch’s Almanack for 1867.

John leech and Mr. BriggS  233

Chapter 8

THOMAS ONWHYN The Browns Visit the Great Exposition of 1851

T

he Great Exhibition of the Works and Industries of all Nations held in London in 1851 generated a tremendous literature and iconography in keeping with its size and historic importance, but only one true comic strip that I have found. There was a welter of publicity, comments, and illustration, pro and con, before and after the official opening, among which Punch’s contribution (by, among others, Tenniel and Leech) is salient, and admiring; the attention of this journal alone would constitute a volume in itself. The little album by Thomas Onwhyn (pp. 240–45), who is remembered today if at all for his many “extra” or “illegitimate” illustrations to Dickens,1 is a peculiarity among all the literary bric-à-brac generated by the great event. Onwhyn’s album deserves here a place d’honneur in its entirety as it unfolds for us (literally) a graphic narrative in the “concertina strip” (or “roller picture”) form adopted by Cruikshank’s Toothache, and enjoying a certain vogue at this time. The fold-out form was a close cousin to the older pictorial mode using open and closing flaps called Transformation, Metamorphosis, or Harlequinades albums. Tiny and very cheap, they were obviously intended for young children. Onwhyn’s title runs in full Mr and Mrs John Brown’s Visit to London to see the Grand Exposition of all Nations. How They were Astonished at its Wonders!! Inconvenienced by the Crowds and Frightened out of their Wits, by the Foreigners. This is no documentary or guidebook but a caricatural riff through and through, fun stuff all the way. Cheap—one shilling plain and 3/6d colored—its twenty-one drawings were etched on twelve leaves 4 ½ by 7 ¼ inches glued together. This format lends it not only physi-

234

cal continuity, but a sort of jerky onward rushing appropriate to the motion of the visiting crowds. Playful, toy-like, it appealed to the burgeoning children’s market, and elicited some nonnarrative competitors in the same format on the same topic, notably Doyle’s An Overland Journey to the Great Exhibition Showing a Few Extra Articles and Visitors, at 3/- and 5/- colored, a little more expensive as befitted a much better known artist in a slightly larger book (sixteen leaves). This offers no more than a static parade of national stereotypes. The Onwhyn was the more appealing article, even to one as young as four years, as may be judged by a passage in the autobiography of Annie Besant. As recounted by Besant, the iconoclastic theosophist famous for her campaign for birth control, she preserved from that early age a “faint memory” of her two years older brother bringing home “one of those folding picture strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged glories that I longed only the more to see” of the Great Exhibition that she was considered too young to visit herself. This was the earliest memory of a very precocious and radical daughter of an iconoclast father, who was reading Milton “easily” at age eight, evidently able to appreciate Onwhyn’s satire.2 There were other similar fold-out albums that one can imagine hawked informally at the entrance or exit to the exhibition. But they are not narrative, closer to guidebooks, such as George Augustus Sala’s The House that Paxton built, twenty-three pages with a hotchpotch of unconnected portraits and incidents; or the informative and serious Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition,3 with its 168 pages. Henry Mayhew’ s Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family who Came up to London to Enjoy themselves and to see the Great Exhibition is in another category: a large quarto book copiously illustrated by Cruikshank, also child- or family-oriented, but published in eight monthly parts, beginning in February 1851, and extending to the end of the exhibition. Like Onwhyn’s, it aims to

amuse, playing upon the reader’s expectation and frustration shared perhaps by actual visitors: the Sandboys family suffer mishaps so numerous en route to London that they end up failing to see inside the Crystal Palace at all. Ironically it is the foreigners who are shown, by Cruikshank, and in some textual hints, to have got inside for a peek. The opening picture of Mr and Mrs Brown’s Visit establishes the immense scale of the audacious steel and glass structure designed by Joseph Paxton. At 312 feet in width and 1,608 feet in length, it was over three times the size of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This was indeed a new kind of cathedral for the new civilization at its zenith, and the new religion of industrial might. Over six million visitors—almost a fifth of Britain’s population at the time—were admitted during the five and a half months the Exhibition was open. Four and a half million, thus a great majority of them, were working-class people entering on the cheap one-shilling tickets. Between 45,000 and 100,000 visitors came on any day, more than enough to “inconvenience” Onwhyn’s Browns; 4,000 exhibitors and 100,000 exhibits were on show. The untraveled provincial Browns were disturbed by the jostling of the crowds, to which all visitors had to become inured. If the crowds like the number of displays were excessive,4 and the Browns clothing and dignity suffered, it could have been worse. The purpose and ideology of the huge show, whose totally unexpected commercial success would finance the building of five large museums still standing in South Kensington today, was not only to exhibit all manner of products from all over the world, but also to represent a Temple of Peace, a shrine to internationalism and the amity of all nations. It was evident also that it proclaimed to the world the economic supremacy of Britain and empire. The Browns, even if they saw themselves as contributors to that supremacy, are immune to this impression. The idealism of the Exhibition’s objective is mercilessly and hilariously subverted, as was to be

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Fig. 8-1. Frontispiece to henry edwards, An Authentic Account of the Chinese Commission . . . on the Great Exhibition, 1851. (From auerbach.)

expected in a work of caricature, by focusing not on the “Works of Industry of all Nations” but on the bizarre human (or subhuman) representatives of those nations. Caricature will ipso facto head this way, rendering the comical and odd in looks and behavior, but the Browns, a nervous, naïve, and innocent provincial family, especially Mrs B., interpret the curiosity of strangers, and all the exotic foreigners, as intrusive and even menacing. Enough to make you vote for Brexit. The overwhelming and disconcerting omnipresence of foreigners aroused not only the traditional

British xenophobia the Browns would have shared with compatriots and too much of the press, but it also undermined the Exhibition’s well-intentioned ambition to welcome the foreigner to the British embrace. The throngs of foreigners were supposed see the host country as the world’s foremost apostle of peace, liberty, free trade, and amicable internationalism. The Great Exhibition was simply good business: Punch saw it as a daring commercial proposition in the form of a steamer coming to save the government and country from financial and legislative shipwreck.5

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Fig. 8-2. “the exhibition and Foreigners,” detail of xenophobic broadsheet. (From auerbach.)

Xenophobia

France

The iconography of xenophobia was everywhere (cf. Figs. 8-1 and 8-2), visible initially even in Punch, which after initial skepticism, was loud in its applause. The Exhibition’s avowed intention to attract foreign tourists was anathema to the likes of Colonel Sibthorpe M.P., die-hard Tory and prime bugbear of Punch and Parliament during the planning of the Exhibition and after it opened. Sibthorpe must have welcomed Onwhyn’s album (had he a sense of humor, which one may doubt). He told Parliament that the Exhibition was “The greatest trash, the greatest fraud, and the greatest imposition ever attempted . . . The object of its promoters is to introduce amongst us foreign stuff of every description . . . All the bad characters will be attracted to Hyde Park . . . I would advise persons residing near the Park to keep a sharp lookout after their silver forks and spoons and servant maids.” In a Commons debate Sibthorpe ranted against the threatened mixing of races, the emergence of a piebald generation, half black and half white, and warned against the “bearded visages of foreigners conjuring up the horrors of free trade.”6 The reality, admitted by the consensus in print at the time, did not match these dire prophesies, and the foreigners were not so often dark-skinned, nor was there an increase in crime, nor were they all immediately identifiable, by their dress, as foreigners.7 Punch ran an article headed “Where are the foreigners?”

The Exhibition’s ideology of being open to the world at large was manifested in the decision to reserve half the exhibits (and half the space), and as many prizes as possible, to outsiders. The French were recognized, enviously, for the quality exceeding quantity of submissions, and for the superiority of their design, decorative art, and visual culture generally; they were even given a special, controversial niche in erotic sculpture. All this earned them a close second place in prizes to Britain. Well over half the foreign visitors were from France, now only eleven hours away. The French were big on exhibitions, for nationalistic reasons, useful as “weapons against the English.” They were genially mocked by Cham at home in the Charivari, and later (1862) in London. The much-satirized prince-president and emperor-to-be Louis Napoleon did not, as far as we know, visit. But another notorious French citizen, Philipon-Daumier’s Robert Macaire, the caricatural type of industrial fraud, with whom LouisNapoleon was elsewhere compared, did show up, in the Onwhyn album; unmistakable in his battered hat and chin-covering scarf, he appears with other Knights of Industry, oh-so-politely trying to entice Mr Brown into some scheme, while they pick his pocket. Doyle for his part in his little album codes the French inclination for theft in Proudhon’s notorious (and much misunderstood) slogan “Property is Theft.”

t h o M a S o n w h Y n : t h e B r o w n S v i S i t t h e g r e at e x P o S i t i o n o F 1 8 5 1     2 3 7

The United States, while relatively poorly represented, was accused of hypocrisy, sending the beautiful nude, very white (marble) Greek Slave of Hiram Powers. Her fetters were deemed by some critics as more appropriate to the black slave, here of course absent, except in a Punch parodic cartoon. Doyle and George Augustus Sala looked for whips and chains along with the small firearms exhibited as the more national, but absent US product. The country as a whole was represented in the Onwhyn album by the savage-looking, much befeathered American Indians, neighbors of the Browns in the impromptu campsite set up on the grounds outside the Exhibition, and brandishing tomahawk and dagger: but look closer and you see the grinning figure behind with the outstretched hand of a beggar, rather than a killer. The figure in a military helmet in the far background observes them and would no doubt prevent any misdoing (p. 244). The spacious tent site hardly justifies The Times’s fear that “whole parks become bivouacs of all vagabonds of London.”8 Native American “Indians,” like other Indians and black Africans, were classed as black in Victorian Britain, as were North Africans when dark enough of skin. Mrs B. is shocked by the Bedouins “in their bedclothes,” without noticing the fiercely bearded Cossack who tries to cajole little daughter Anna Maria but only frightens her, or her son Johnny, who drops his great catalogue at the sight of the “exhibition of ivories” in the mouths of a pair of black men in a booth. His even greater fear may be imagined when he feels threatened by “mysterious” smiles accompanying an offer of purchase (to be eaten?) by Cannibal Islanders. They are seated at a table in close proximity, wreathed in smiles that may in fact betoken good will (p. 243). One wonders if such an interracial proximity happened in reality. A conspicuous “foreign” absence in Onwhyn is that of the working classes, whose presence and good behavior were noted approvingly by the press. On at least one occasion in Punch, they are treat-

ed more ambiguously, as when John Leech groups them resting under a statue of Shakespeare on a pedestal inscribed with the citation, “One touch of nature, makes the world kin.” Under the heading “Dinner-time at the Crystal Palace,” we see various poorly dressed characters, some decent-looking and with small children, some soldiers, and a couple of shabby-looking males drinking spirits, which was not allowed inside the exhibition.

Children and Crime High in the gallery under the roof, little Johnny Brown escapes his parents distracted by the upward gaze of some very hairy Germans (p. 242). He imprudently climbs the railing, falls into a tree (the Duke of Wellington helped prevent these, preexistent in Hyde Park, from being chopped down) and is rescued by a black South African bushman, a bosjeman. Among the families visiting the Exhibition there were naturally many children; school visits accounted for 35,540.9 No children are recorded as misbehaving (the opposite in fact) like Johnny. The worst misbehavior was a bit of littering, and children needing the police when lost. The force of six hundred police was universally admired, and had little to do; they might have thanked the bosjeman for his useful work. To the surprise of many observers, there were no serious accidents at the Exhibition (not counting two excursion train crashes), or crime. One much-reported crime—committed by thieves presumed to be local—had a comic touch: German detectives sent from Frankfurt to keep an eye on German thieves had their luggage and papers stolen on arrival in London.10 Punch mocked the fears for the safety of Her Majesty in a drawing “as she appeared on the First of May [opening day], surrounded by ‘Horrible Conspirators and Assassins.’” The Royal Family was observed to proceed peacefully, unmolested, through the Exhibition that Prince Albert had so strenuously supported and planned.

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Xenophobia or Ethnography? At the end Onwhyn gives us concentrated ethnographies, kaleidoscopes of exotic peoples gathered in native dress in “fashionable” London streets and the theater (pp. 240–45). The author evidently delighted in his well-researched visual variety of the peoples of the world that the colored version of his album would have enhanced. In reality, commentators remarked on the unobtrusiveness of the foreigners’ dress, their discreet behavior, and the relative paucity of the numbers. The hovering “clouds of tobacco smoke” in the Park suggests that many (men) took the chance to smoke, which was forbidden inside the Exhibition, and that there were as many ways of using tobacco as there were of dress. A familiar figure would be Onwhyn’s typical German, standing presidentially in the center with a huge pipe; other figures may be Turkish, smoking hashish ritually, in groups. Since the Browns are “nearly suffocated” by the smoke (and smell?), it may be that, hailing from some preindustrial town in the north, they had not anticipated just how smoky London could be in the midsummer heat.

accommodations, often in private houses and even in opera boxes (see Cruikshank illustration 3 in Sandboys) and idle cabs, had failed. There was gouging and cheating. Punch made much of the malpractice, and shows private homes, booked months in advance, having to tolerate both the over- and under-hygienic stranger. A sour-looking house-mistress offers small children the luxury of a “bed” inside a chest-of-drawers, while American Indians use a private drawing room for their drunken riot (both Punch Almanack predictions for 1851). To avoid such indignities, the Browns, fed up with London, resolve to return home by the earliest morning train. It was an encounter of unequals: the lowest form of cultural artifact with the highest real-life form of national expression.

Lodgings There was some truth to the Browns’ experience after they left the Exhibition, of finding London teeming with the strangest “fashionable life,” in the street and at the theater. The latter offered another gallery of exotics, and attracted many of the one million, like The Sandboys in the Mayhew-Cruikshank novel, who traveled from the north, brought by special excursion trains at special prices. Employers apparently gave time off to encourage workers to attend. Having failed to find accommodation for the night, the Browns resort to a cab (advertising the exorbitant 5 shillings for the night). They suffered the fate of many visitors for whom the lodgings register and all the specially prepared or makeshift

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Pl. 8-1. thomas onwhyn, Mr and Mrs John Brown’s visit to london to see the grand exposition of all nations. ackermann (1851). thirteen continuous etched designs on “roller album” here grouped on six pages. 24 0     t h o M a S o n w h Y n : t h e B r o w n S v i S i t t h e g r e at e x P o S i t i o n o F 1 8 5 1

Pl. 8-2. thomas onwhyn, Mr and Mrs John Brown’s visit to london to see the grand exposition of all nations.

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Pl. 8-3. thomas onwhyn, Mr and Mrs John Brown’s visit to london to see the grand exposition of all nations.

24 2     t h o M a S o n w h Y n : t h e B r o w n S v i S i t t h e g r e at e x P o S i t i o n o F 1 8 5 1

Pl. 8-4. thomas onwhyn, Mr and Mrs John Brown’s visit to london to see the grand exposition of all nations.

t h o M a S o n w h Y n : t h e B r o w n S v i S i t t h e g r e at e x P o S i t i o n o F 1 8 5 1     24 3

Pl. 8-5. thomas onwhyn, Mr and Mrs John Brown’s visit to london to see the grand exposition of all nations.

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Pl. 8-6. thomas onwhyn, Mr and Mrs John Brown’s visit to london to see the grand exposition of all nations.

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Chapter 9

TENNIEL AND THE WILD BEAST HUNT IN INDIA (1853); GRISET’S AND PODGER’S ELEPHANTS

J

ohn Tenniel (not yet Sir John) is best remembered for two things: first his immortal illustrations to the immortal Alice books of Lewis Carroll, and second, for his virtually sole responsibility for the big political cartoon in the weekly Punch magazine: about 2,165 full-page and double-page drawings over the fifty years 1851–1901.1 These are mostly serious, dignified, classicizing, imperial, allegorical designs rather lacking in humor. He did a comic strip, out of the blue, virtually just once, and never repeated it. (No less out of the blue: Picasso’s only comic strip, The Dream and Lie of Franco, 1937.) Why did Tenniel try out a very new genre at this moment in 1853, busy as he was with his weekly big political cartoon? An explanation may be that having been brought into Punch as a replacement for the abruptly departed Richard Doyle, he felt an urge to show his mettle in an essentially humorous new-fangled genre that Doyle had just mastered in Punch. To be sure, a sense of humor was not lacking in Tenniel’s decorations for Punch, but a four-part narrative, featuring the adventures of a neophyte civilian hunter in India, was a new kind of challenge. At the same time, this was no apolitical comedy: as demonstrated above (p. 96), a sharp, not immediately obvious, political context emerges in the setting of the adjacent texts in the magazine, which treat, satirically, of Indian affairs. The chance to draw animals in action and in their natural habitat moreover was welcome to one who had cut his teeth on illustrations to Aesop, and made the large beasts he had studied in the London zoo the stuff of

24 6

his political allegories in the big cartoons. To add humor, a whiff of farce to the realistically dangerous hunts suffusing the entire series required a shift in perspective. And India was alive with political controversy, as we have seen. In four weekly parts of eight drawings each, Tenniel depicts the farcical and rather improbable adventures of Peter Piper, a neophyte civilian hunter in Burhampoor (Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh), Bengal, India (pp. 257–64). His ambition was that of many a British denizen of the subcontinent, to vanquish the various large beasts that roamed the Bengal presidency. We have touched on the domestic political context for such a quest. We can go further: In the eyes of the imperial invader, the wild beast represented, to a degree, the “savage” and dangerous Indian natives on the one hand, and, to a lesser degree, potential enemy invaders of the subcontinent on the other. India, known as the jewel in the British imperial crown, was increasingly restive; in 1853, when the comic strips in Punch appeared, the British administration was not only seen as corrupt, but had been tarnished by numerous small rebellions. These small revolts presaged the great rebellion, the Sepoy rebellion, of four years later, now also known as the Indian Mutiny. The rebellion was triggered, after decades of discontent, by the abusive treatment of indigenous Indian mercenaries, who were required to bite cartridges believed to be made from animal fat, contrary to their religious beliefs. It was during this catastrophe for British rule in India that murderous natives were perceived as openly manifesting their essential nature as furious wild beasts by attacking soldiers and civilians, even women and children. “Niggers are tigers, niggers are tigers,” protested Tennyson, demanding the British be “less tender to our savages.”2 The rebels were seen as consumed by the “ferocious craving for European blood,” like cannibals or carnivorous beasts “with the ferocity of the tiger in the jungle.”3 In truth, the rebellions grew out of native peoples’ long-simmering,

amply justified anger against long-standing injustices and oppressions. The British press exaggerated their atrocities, and applauded the condign punishment of Indians deemed guilty. Rebellion was the ongoing internal threat. Externally, we remember the subcontinental empire was felt to be menaced by neighboring expansive Russia, on the eve of the Crimean war, and, more distantly and indirectly, by France, the traditional foreign enemy. Mr. Peter Piper, the hero of four episodes run in Punch February–March 1853, is like Leech’s Mr. Briggs, his better-known equivalent on the domestic hunting field, no natural huntsman. He is short and fat, and naturally timid, with more ambition than courage. Piper is a civilian new to the sport, appearing at first in a most unmilitary patterned shirt. In his various adventures, he is saved from disaster and death by native attendants and random, lucky shots. Yet in all four episodes he ends triumphant, to applause which he receives with smug complacency. The success of his hunting, like that of British rule, depended on the “good,” subservient assistants in the hunts, kin to their military equivalents, the obedient or not-so-obedient native mercenaries (known as sepoys) who composed the bulk of the British army.

Tiger: Royal Prize The spectrum of animals that Peter Piper encounters comprises seven of the most conspicuous of the dozen or so larger beasts whose hunting is detailed in the major compendium of animal game of the era, by Captain Baldwin, Fellow of the Zoological Society.4 The “Royal Bengal tiger” is the protagonist of the fourth and last, climactic Tenniel episode. Coming last, he/she (henceforward “he”) occupies a climactic pride of place here and is featured first in the hunting manuals. First prize of the hunt, the tiger was becoming rare in parts of India. He was the most feared of all

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wild beasts, as predator on cattle, horses, wild hogs, and deer—and occasionally on human villagers, who viewed him with superstitious dread. Like the leopard, the tiger was impossible to trap, and he was considered extremely dangerous, as well as exhausting to those foolish enough to try hunting him on foot. Naturally solitary and averse to humans, when wounded the tiger became decidedly ferocious. He was a metaphor of ferocity. The native beaters, necessarily on foot, faced getting badly mauled or killed. The safest and most luxurious way of hunting “the striped creature,” as adopted by Tenniel’s Peter Piper, was from a howdah on top of an elephant. The practice of the tiger hunter sitting in a tree on a platform (“machan”) was despised by some Europeans, though Baldwin accepts the tactic. The safest and most efficient way was also the most expensive: in a team of up to forty to fifty elephants; but Tenniel manages to find room for just three, with two (or parts of them) visible behind the chief one. As a group they give each other courage. The females, smaller, easier to maneuver, and deemed more courageous, were considered the best. As it marches through the jungle, the elephantine contingent is preceded by shikaries or beaters to flush out the prey; Baldwin reminds us that these highly skilled, brave, and indispensable assistants are often among the poorest of Indians, desperate, halfstarved (Tenniel shows all attendants very thin). Here we see just the mahout, who controlled the elephant as best he could from the howdah on top, armed with a tiny spear that served only to prick the elephant on the crown of the head. This “driver” was a critical factor, to be chosen and watched with care. Diminutive, portly Peter Piper’s unsuitability or unpreparedness for the hunt is marked from the start by the tiny ladder up which the mahout must hoist him onto the elephant. Panicked by the “appalling growl” of a hidden tiger (or by its scent? In reality tigers do not growl), Piper is thrown off his mount when it rushes under a tree, which catches him by the neck and throws him backward. There,

our hero is seized by a nightmare of being surrounded by a host of tigers, until he is rescued by the elephant, now back under control. The tale, and Peter Piper himself literally, are held in suspense, as the reader awaits the following week’s installment, where the tiger reappears for real, snarling at the elephant, while Piper cowers on the howdah. The tiger may have leapt onto the elephant’s trunk, but he is thrown down by sharp tusks and massive weight of the great beast who crushes the life out of the striped assailant from a kneeling position. This may be regarded as a sort of mercy killing, given the likelihood of the hunter’s point-blank shot into the tiger causing a wound potentially mortal but allowing him to slink away, leaving a trail of blood for the beaters. The elephant kneeling and crushing his assailant was a typical defense, according to a book of 1840.5 On his return, Peter Piper’s friends lavishly praise him for his “indomitable courage” and “reckless daring.” The elephant pricked by the mahout is the true victor and savior here, and a brave one, given his/her natural fear of tigers.

Tipu’s Tiger The tiger was not only visible in zoos at home in London. There was a stuffed tiger on display with patriotic associations easily available to Tenniel’s readers. This was and is the famous mechanical tiger first displayed in the East India Company’s museum, where it was much admired, as by Keats for instance, before passing to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The beast was booty from the storming of Seringapatam in South India, in 1799, a relic and reminder of a great British victory. “Tipu’s tiger” consisted of a French-made man-eating-tiger-cum-organ, which, when wound up, enacted the killing of a prostrate, shrieking European victim.6 The tiger was rich in symbolism. He was generally understood to represent royal glory, Indian princely power and

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status, here that of the ruler of Seringapatam, the famous rebel against the British, Tipu Sultan (Tipoo Sahib), known as the “tiger of Mysore.” The British looting in Seringapatam is the ominous starting point of the era’s most popular novel, illustrated by Du Maurier, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), where the stealing of a valuable diamond at Seringapatam will bring disaster to an English family, and an Indian revenge in the novel’s present (1849). The history of hunting as expression of royal power was long, as seen in the gigantic Assyrian reliefs celebrating ancient royal lion hunts that were at this time just arriving in Britain. The Mughal emperor Jahangir kept a record of his hunts spanning the years 1580–1616, to a total of 17,167 animals killed, including eighty tigers. But for Tipu, the tiger was obsession, his rule incarnate, his heraldic device a constant presence; real chained tigers guarded the entrance to his palace in Seringapatam. The mechanical tiger killing his European enemy was a simulacrum of victory; losing tiger, his seat of power, and his life was triple defeat. For the British the tiger represented the great Indian colony as a whole, his killing a conquest of a vast population: Colonial officials were apt to equate “recalcitrant wild animals” such as tigers to “disobedient human beings such as thugs and dacoits” and other rebels in their midst who must be eliminated.7 There was a parallel process in Britain itself, where the peasants and so-called poachers were hunted down like game and their livelihood destroyed in the interests of the aristocratic hunt (cf. Fig. 3-2). A few years after Peter Piper’s adventures appeared, in the great Indian Mutiny of 1857 a perceived offense to religious taboos among the sepoys or native mercenaries triggered widespread rebellion. Massacres on both sides were terrible, became legendary.8 We have described the effect of vicious Punch cartoons celebrating the punishment of the Indian rebels of 1857, causing an upsurge in its circulation. Punch, known in India as well as in Britain, should be held accountable.

At this point, Tenniel adopts a different view of the character of the tiger: he represents stealth and deceit, hiding then pouncing when wounded, as well as cowardice, perhaps even in the high-flown rhetoric of a popular author of 1844 as “a blood-thirsty and savage despot, malevolent, pestilent and cowardly, who preys on humans.” 9 Real-life lion-to-tiger fights, which carried much mythic freight as testified in art, were extremely rare, if only because the lion was rare in India. Nevertheless, the medal officially struck for Seringapatam shows the British lion overpowering the tiger, to the inscription (in Arabic) “God’s lion conquers.” (The words for lion and tiger were synonymous in Tipu’s language.) Over the next century and a half, the tiger would face near-extinction. Of the 100,000 estimated left in 1900, there were 5,000 a century later. Since then, the tiger has come back, but only just a little: According to the World Wildlife Fund, there were 1,411 left in the wild in 2006, and 3,891 in 2016. More than this number are thought to be held in “secret” (private) captivity across the United States.

Pig-Sticking The tiger episode is well placed at the end, but the quartet opens with a creature lower in the chain of being, Peter Piper’s engagement in a relatively minor sport, a day’s pig-sticking near Burhampoor, as the title runs. Unhorsed by a boar at the start, and catching at the end only a baby prize, Peter Piper has first to deal with the bigger and more menacing game, tiger, crocodile, and snake. These threats are thrown in as divertissements en route, for dramatic effect, or perhaps because Tenniel originally saw this first eight-drawing episode as a one-off event, needing grander zoological enhancement. But its success demanded sequels. The pig, wild hog, or boar was common in India, as in parts of Europe; in France it shows up in caricature as dangerous to the hunter (in Cham terrifying him), but was not known in

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Britain. It was a great nuisance to farmers whose crops the vegetarian animal destroyed. In common with tiger hunting the colonists justified pig-sticking as a benefaction to the natives, as well as great fun. It was regarded as the best training for both horse and rider, to be conducted with spear, or javelin, or lance—never with a gun. Shooting at a pig was “considered as a worse crime, if possible, than shooting a fox in England . . . no sportsman worthy of the name would ever think of shooting them.”10 For our little hero a day’s pig-sticking was the “height of human enjoyment,” but was also reputed a “dangerous and bloody sport.” The wild boar was fast and agile, quick to turn and suddenly charge as it changed direction, and ferocious when enraged. Large, forty inches at the shoulder, up to six feet in length, it was easily provoked, especially by humans; armed with the terrible power of tusks eight to nine inches long, it could cut a large dog nearly in two in a single stroke. It could also kill a horse, inflict terrible injuries on a human—a beater or even on occasion the hunter himself. Peter Piper’s horse bolts in terror, throwing its rider off, as the pig with its piglets rushes past or at him. Our little hero, correctly armed only with a spear or pike resembling no more than a pointed stick, manages or dares to capture only a young trio of defenseless little piglets, before returning in his “triumphant manner” to a repast with admiring friends. The status of “pick-sticking” is well illustrated in the testimony of the Duke of Wellington, hunting in France sometime after Waterloo, and having “speared a huge boar, a feat so he told a friend, of which he was more proud than he was of the battle of Waterloo. It was a feat of Horsemanship as well as management of the spear.” Without laying claim to having himself hunted bigger prey when in India, the duke once witnessed the return of an AngloIndian expedition with a collection “including cheetahs, jackals, tigers, foxes, a boa constrictor sixteen feet long, eleven elephants’ tails and three carp.” 11

English officers in India, who were passionate hunters of foxes at home, as testified by Leech in Punch, found an equivalent not only in sticking wild pigs, but also in lancing jackals, for which they imported hounds from home. This sport was, like pig-sticking, considered essential military training, and useful for weaning officers from noxious pastimes like drinking and betting. It was claimed that the courageous boar enjoys the chase as much as the huntsman, reveling in the spearing and fighting to the “bitter end,” a noble death. One may doubt that the sow in Tenniel enjoyed losing its young to Peter Piper’s spear.12 Peter Piper’s pig-sticking expedition brings him into confrontation with crocodile, tiger, and snake, the latter species said to be a greater killer of natives than any other wild animal. Tenniel’s snake, by its size, is not the real culprit, as the deadly poisonous cobra or krait might be, but a boa constrictor, said to grow to thirty to forty feet long and to be capable of swallowing an ox:13 more poetic license here, surely. The boa’s native habitat is South America and the Caribbean, not India. Peter Piper’s spear misses the gaping jaws of one crocodile, and its offspring close by, but leaving another recumbent (dead??), he turns from it, and the huge snake behind, to face a tiger who to judge by the bones before him has a taste for human flesh. He is saved from this, and another crocodile, by his trusty syce (groom) who brings up his horse. Mugger crocodiles were to be found in most of the rivers of India, but one appears in Captain Baldwin’s compendium only in an unlikely battle with a tiger, and in Blaine’s contemporary Encyclopaedia as a native of Africa and the Americas.

Buffalo The wild Indian buffalo was reputed bold, savage, and dangerous (pp. 261–62). An ill-advised rifle shot pitches Piper with his native guide and canoe into

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the water. But the shot surprisingly has taken effect, and a crocodile crawls up over the buffalo corpse, while the hunter wades out to confront a whole buffalo herd. Panicked, Piper fires a random shot into the air and gets his portly frame somehow up a tree, following the example of his syce, who has attached himself to a bamboo-like tree as thin as he is. A second barrel from Piper “in gallant style” from his impossible firing position, is lethal to the “monster,” allowing him to make a triumphal return. He is followed by the syce dragging the buffalo skin and horns, which must have been taken (by the labor of the syce no doubt) on the spot. It was a trophy of considerable commercial value, a tiger skin being worth ten rupees, more than a month’s wages. Buffalo herds were beaten with lines of elephants, which were vulnerable to being charged. The long description by Baldwin, reminiscing about this time, includes an incident, as in Tenniel’s drawing, of a hunter being tossed high into the air in a “tremendous somersault,” when a native syce failed to fire as ordered.14

Bear The manuals tell us that the trick with bear was to get above the beast, as Peter Piper does on his promontory of rock overlooking the bear’s den below. We see a firework about to be thrown into his cave, in order to bring him out, as was recommended, but Piper finds himself in his supposedly “first-rate position” having to deal with the bear creeping up behind him. Unable to run away (which would be fatal anyway), and losing his rifle, Piper decides to “grapple manfully with his ferocious antagonist.” He appears to be locked in the mythic and proverbial “bear-hug” by which the bear sought to squeeze his assailant to death, and which, we are assured, might just happen in North America or in the remote parts of Europe but not so with the Indian bear.15 The incidence of people being badly mauled by Indian

bears was high, but being basically vegetarian, they were not likely to eat them. Piper’s engaging the bear in what resembles a wrestling match or “bear-hug” requires special note. Not hard to tame though clumsy and troublesome as a pet, the bear sometimes served as a regimental mascot, as well as a showpiece at fairs. The “bearhug” (a wrestling term) is an adaptation derived from the European tame bear taught to dance and fight dogs in the popular “sport” of bearbaiting. For this the bear was often rendered virtually defenseless, and when made to wrestle with a man, “equalized” by having its claws and teeth removed, which many considered very cruel. Having, most fancifully, wrestled the bear to mutual exhaustion after losing his gun, Peter Piper seeks a conclusion with a paltry knife and “after a desperate struggle” is only saved from “perishing in the attempt” by a shot from his trusty syce. But he still claims a complete personal triumph. The trusty syce is invariably shown as thin, often very thin. If he is not suffering from one of the bouts of starvation brought on by British policies, his compatriots might be, when struck by a famine—in practice the most feared and most real tiger of India. Royal finale: The Prince of Wales (future King Edward VII), the “pig-sticking prince,” as he was called, in India 1875–1876, claimed a game-bag including “eight tigers, a cheetah, numerous elephants, a crocodile and several much-prized Indian pigs.” This made him fair game to the much-reviled Republican movement.16 I call Tenniel’s comic strip series unique in his vast oeuvre. I must discount a trivial one-pager (p. 265) motivated by a personal dislike for bicycles and tricycles at a time when hopeful impractical new designs proliferated. This dislike extended (later) to motor cars and the whole mad quest for speed. There was no doubt some personal satisfaction for the artist in showing the intrusive cyclist suffering a well-deserved humiliation on the hunting field.

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Imperialist Hunting: Masculine and Patriotic The exposing of naturally pacific and docile elephants to the attacks of tigers and buffalo seems to us an obvious cruelty to which the practitioners and commentators of the time (including Tenniel) are oblivious. From the 1870s moreover, improvements in weaponry made the shooting of big game an easier, and commoner practice, leading to concern for the extinction of the tiger and elephant alike.17 In our own day, fox hunting and deer stalking have fallen under a moral pall, while big-game hunting is everywhere condemned, although a large fee can secure access (Donald Trump’s sons are notorious enthusiastic big-game hunters), and it seems impossible to stop poaching. For all the nineteenth century, and a long time since, the chase was normalized as an essentially masculine and British culture, and by no one more than by Leech and Punch, with its ubiquitous cartoons on the subject. This normalization was never accepted by the French counterpart of Leech and Tenniel, Le Charivari’s Cham, whose abnormally humane viewpoint typically has the hare taking revenge or threatening its persecutors coded as more dangerous to themselves and their fellow hunters than is their intended prey.18 Ernest Griset, born in France, educated in England and newcomer to Punch in 1867, specialized in animal comedy. Early on (November 23 of that year, p. 266) he drew a sequence showing Monsieur Blague (Mr Joke) hunting “à la française” (thus virtually crediting Cham), discomfited by “devoted lapins” who organize their revenge, which he flees as for his life. His was a promising novelty but after doing 360 drawings his first year (1867?),19 he was dropped by Punch and passed on to Fun and illustrations of Aesop. Two months earlier Griset had imagined a comic strip with elephants tracked by two Englishmen in Ceylon, one military, the other civilian, having decided to “have a pot at the elephants” (p. 267). The

beasts charge and put them to ignominious flight. Unscathed, and after refreshing themselves (but not the shikaries), they witness the young elephants having innocent fun, in an endearing, highly anthropomorphic fashion, reminiscent of an illustration to the classic children’s Babar the Elephant books (first published 1931), using human bodies with elephant heads, modeled, I am told, on the kind of sculpture of the Hindu god Ganesha, as exhibited at the Paris World Fair of 1855. This frolicking perhaps serves to disarm any reader disapproving of the shooting of elephants (one is killed at the end) under the clearly ironic title “Here’s sport indeed.” Unusually, a source is given to lend credence to this particularly fanciful-seeming vignette, in The Wild Elephant, and the Method of Capturing it and Taming it in Ceylon, by Sir Emerson Tennent, Bart., K.C.S., LL.D., F. R. S &c., which Griset must have just read in the most recent, 1867 edition (p. 54, 1st ed. 1859), based on experiences in that country 1846–1847. There Griset could have read of a herd of elephants seen happily enjoying drinking and bathing, but when frightened by the mere breaking of a twig, becoming as a “solid mass [which] instantly took to flight like a herd of frightened deer, each of the smaller calves being apparently shouldered and carried along between two of the older ones.” A chapter in this scientific-looking book on “elephant shooting” admits (pp. 77–78) that it required little or no skill, and quietly deplores the feat of a Major Rogers who killed upward of 1,400 of the beasts that exist in Ceylon “in vast numbers.” Griset may have noted another aspect of Tenniel’s fun at the expense of the India’s big-game hunters, making his own version of Hunting the Wild Boar (p. 265) The scraggly hunter, ironically described as “a respectable gentleman” while looking as disreputable as his sport, turns tail even before firing a shot, climbs up a tree from which he falls onto the back of his prey followed by its mate and progeny, one of whom has taken his hat. Panicked, he is driven into a river or bog, and barely saves himself from

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angry teeth and tusks. And yet, improbably, “the Great Nimrod” manages to kill all “four sounders,” and make a triumphant return in a boar-laden cart to the applause of the village infant rabble. Griset had a rival in animal drawing in Briton Riviere (b. 1840), French of Huguenot descent, well known as a professional painter who became a Royal Academician, but who in his youth did some work for Punch. Riviere’s Adventures of a Monastic Missionary (p. 269) is a curiosity. It follows, according to the verse at the end, from the challenge to rhyme Timbuctoo and Cassowary (e.g., “hymnbook too” and “missionary”), and to depict the “notorious voracity of the bird [which] sealed the poor preacher’s fate.” The cassowary, reputed a large “dinosaur” of a bird, and “the most dangerous of birds on earth,” is native to New Guinea and northeast Australia. The references to “The Dying Camel” and “S. Katherine’s translation” are to presumably well-known paintings of the time.20

Mazeppa and Menken From this linguistic frivolity we pass to Riviere’s final comic strip contribution to Punch, which brings on stage (literally) a rarity in the new genre: parody of an old, well-known legend which features, fitting our chapter on wild beasts, a wild horse left deliberately wild in order to punish, to the death, its helpless “rider” guilty of a sexual transgression (Fig. 9-1). In a great irony, at the time, the stage version that inspired the strip was itself deemed guilty of a public sexual transgression, an extraordinary context that demands some explanation. Adopting a very different, Doylish outline style, Riviere’s Mazeppa (pp. 270–71) plays parodically with a literary classic, Byron’s epic poem Mazeppa (1819), which was inspired by the legend of Ivan Mazepa (sic), who became hetman (leader) of Ukraine in 1687. Riviere’s rendition is the only example in our Rebirth period, or later for that matter,

of comic strip as literary parody, here of a famous poetic romance. Adaptations of  literary classics would become staples of the graphic novel, as of the film industry, but Punch, while much addicted to parody in prose, verse, and single cartoons, printed just one comic strip version, interesting here for its adaptation from a stage production, and because its reception was warmed by the hot controversy surrounding the play. Riviere’s modest six-scene reduction of Byron bears no comparison with the only predecessor known to me, Cham’s comic virtual “graphic novel,” a chapter by chapter “rereading” of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables published 1862–1863 (in 240 drawings), concurrently with the novel.21 Riviere, with his French roots, would have known the Cham Hugo parody, while scarcely tempted to have his Byronic hero rival Hugo’s. The incredible but dramatic legend taken up by Byron’s Mazeppa had long offered ready-made parody and adaptation. This made it very popular, despite the fact that the original poem had received only scant attention at the time (“it fell quite flat,” outshone no doubt by Byron’s masterpiece, Don Juan, also of 1819)22 and has been largely ignored by scholarship. But the story of Mazeppa fired the imagination of all kinds of artists (painters, writers) and inspired an infinite number of performances and adaptations, derived not just from Byron, but also older legend as popularized, notably, by Voltaire. Byron’s was Europe-wide the best-known poetic version of the Mazeppa story, although a shorter version by Hugo in 1829 was influential in France. Riviere’s version, which commands our special attention for its context at the time of its publication in Punch, was an extreme abbreviation of the familiar legend, the historicity of which was virtually nil.23 What of the “sexual transgression,” starting point of both Byron’s and Riviere’s versions? In both authors, it is the conventional one, an attempt on the honor of the ruler’s wife. Riviere, however, indirectly but inevitably refers to a very different kind of trans-

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Fig. 9-1. “tied to the Fiery Steed,” frontispiece of “the Mazeppa galop,” one of many tributes to adah isaacs Menken’s london boom.

gression: the transgendering to female of the hero, always hitherto represented as a naked male when tied to the wild horse. Riviere’s version, even as it keeps (gingerly, one feels) the nude male Mazeppa, emerges, like other eroticizing stage productions of the time, but like no other comic strip of the period, from the familiar political-cultural, virtually stereotypical Victorian debate over sexuality in the public sphere. The controversy over the “scandalous nudity” in an outrageous form of bondage on horseback, of a Mazeppa who on stage suddenly changed sex, a figure well known to Riviere and his readers (as we shall see), reverberated for years, in the “prim and decorous” 1860s and beyond. The abrupt sexualization of the legend marks a decisive shift in popular acceptance, indeed demand, for the erotic on the stage, the arts, and broadly in the public sphere.

Byron would have been astonished, and not a little pleased, by the success of his male (very male) hero of a well-known myth that added to his reputation as an entertainer, albeit at some distance from his own verse, which runs to thirty-one breakneck pages in my 1831 Murray edition. Riviere’s parody, too short at six scenes on two pages, lies in a long diffuse line of Byronesque renditions embracing all the major arts especially in France: in painting Géricault, Delacroix, Vernet, and many others, in poetry Victor Hugo in Les Orientales (1829), and in music (Liszt 1854, later Tchaikovsky). In hippophile England the violence and romance of the Mazeppa story took on a very English tinge, in what resembles the modern comic pantomime, but featuring prominently the other “hero” of the chief episode, the horse to which Mazeppa was cruelly bound as a punishment, and on which he very nearly died. The resulting plays, virtually equestrian spectacles, enjoyed a long history of popularity by mid-century, stimulated by Henry Miller’s appropriately titled Mazeppa or the Wild Horse of Tartary (printed 1831), a burlesque in two acts, much performed over the decades and joined in 1850 by another “equestrian” adaptation, James Ryder’s Mazeppa, a Romance. This version, or a rival burlesque performance, was lavishly reviewed and loved by Punch in August of that year (pp. 134–35) in an edition by Astley’s, the hippic specialist theater. Its estimated “eighty somethingth” staging there, which delighted the “overflowing” thousands, was deemed by Punch a “brilliant spectacle” of “utmost possible effect.” Such productions challenged actors and scene designers faced with evoking as best they could sensational, violent, intensely physical imagery of passion and suffering. As lavish spectacle, Mazeppa productions may be seen as meeting the new 1860s taste for “sensation drama,” with its violence, extreme melodramatic effects, and lavishly realistic scenery. Much depended on the wild career of the untamed horse, a prolonged indeed chief episode

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in Byron. Probably circus-trained as s/he would have been, but hardly comfortable in this peculiar role, the horse was subject to Astley’s special requirements, and laden with his passive human burden. Nor could the tightly bound burden have been anything but uncomfortable. Mazeppa himself, normally male, could on occasion be substituted by a dummy strapped on board. The 1850 Punch review does not tell us, but its author admired the automata imitating hungry ravens and pursuing wolves always included in French painting. Punch’s list of deviations did not jeopardize this “reading” of Byron, “ludicrous” as it was. From 1864 an exciting new element shook the stage: sexualization, thanks to American actress Adah Isaacs Menken. She was the first of many female Mazeppas, wearing only a body-stocking which sufficiently suggested the explicit nudity of the legendary male hero and was found especially, scandalously titillating, “stripping off all woman’s modesty,” “the vulgar puff of a Jewess,” according to sniffy verses in Punch visiting Astley’s and its female star. Menken, braver than most men in the role, refused to be substituted by a dummy. Her courage was physical as well as moral: she suffered three accidents caused by missteps of the horse to which she was bound. The first she escaped by releasing the “single thong” just in time as the horse fell; the second, in Paris, more dangerous, left her seriously injured and unconscious until the next morning, which ended the show and earned her a visit from the emperor Napoleon III’s personal physician; and the third, during her last appearance in London May 1868, precipitated illness and premature death.24 Menken soon became a legend of her own, the best-paid actress of the age, a prolific writer, admired poet and feminist, generous to a fault with her huge income, living a life spiced by scandal, with many marriages and love affairs. She was “the most talked about woman in England,” a household name, a one-person salon attracting the literary elite of London. Touted as America’s first great international

star, Menken was the object of erotic poetic fantasies such as this: “Every curve of her limbs was as appealing as a line in a Persian love song. She was a vision of celestial harmony made manifest in the flesh—a living and breathing poem that set the heart to music and throbbed rhythmically to a passion that was as splendid as it was pure.”25 Menken died age thirty-three, in 1868, some months preceding the appearance of Riviere’s drawings, having been admired by contemporaries such as Charles Reade, Christina Rossetti, our old friend Watts Phillips, and Charles Dickens, to whom she dedicated a volume of her poetry, and with whom she formed a close friendship. I believe that the spirit and memory of sensational Menken, who had just died, inspired Riviere’s comic strip. But he was not able in that elite, conservative weekly Punch to show a female, much less Menken’s scandalously nude-looking “undress,” even as it appears, relatively clothed in some of the public illustrations (Fig. 9-1). Astley’s own playbill uses a very lightly clad male figure, below the name (very large) MENKEN above. It is ironic and significant that two of Menken’s admiring entourage were Punch men: senior editor Shirley Brooks and comic poet Francis Burnand, both of whom may have encouraged Riviere, known as the animal expert, to render tribute to the most successful and sensational play of the age, embodied by its most celebrated exponent. But Punch’s inborn prudery, evident enough in its humorless verse hostile to the actress, would have insisted on Riviere using a male Mazeppa despite all evidence that cross-gendering females were all the rage on stage. Like so much of the press, the two editors also fretted about the alleged intimate liaison Menken in her last years formed with the reviled poet Algernon Swinburne. She died, painfully ill and lonely, in Paris on August 10, 1868, but having bested all the imitations, destined to “to live, or die, by Mazeppa” and remain the “ghost behind all future Mazeppas.”26

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Hunting as Youthful Initiation and Adventure Hunting wild beasts was the epitome of adventure for youth. The idea of imperial conquest of human and animal subjects was conducive to “true manliness” and “the cause of England’s moral as well as physical supremacy over all the other nations of the earth,” as editorialized by Boys of England at its start in 1866.27 This early specialized magazine for boys, subtitled “A Young Gentleman’s Journal for Sport, Travel, Fun and Instruction,” to which H. R. H. Prince Arthur (sixteen years old in 1866) is headlined as a subscriber, priced its sixteen pages at just one penny, and by 1868 could boast of unprecedented weekly sales of 150,000. Visual fun was lacking until September 4 that year, when there appeared on the back page a ninescene comic strip recounting how rival lovers quarrel while fishing and have to be fished out of the water. This is pablum compared to what the character Benjamin Podger gets up to on the Himalayas, in the next four issues (pp. 272–75). The Himalayas turn out to be mountainous to begin with, then mostly jungle with fauna rather like India: jackals, crocodiles, monsters aquatic, scaly and winged, and prominently, an elephant attacked by a tiger. With his dark-skinned (Indian) servant Toosedee, Podger, a civilian like Peter Piper, is confronted by

what seem to be Arabs as well as assorted large wild beasts, fearful insects, and monsters of the deep. The Arabs turn out to be friendly, subject themselves unaccountably to Podgers and give him a horse. Attacked on horseback by a tiger, he is saved (generously!) by an elephant he was hunting. The elephant is speared to death by Arabs (there is a video on the Internet showing this “brutal assassination” committed today by African tribesmen). Toosedee saves Podgers from strangulation by a huge snake, before the pair return triumphantly to take their bows “to the young gentlemen of the British Empire.” Awkwardly drawn and illogically constructed by an anonymous artist, the tale can hardly have appealed much to intelligent older children—or a sixteen-year-old Prince Arthur—unless readers were taken with the sheer novelty of a comic strip in a youth magazine. In the context of the illustrated fiction filling the magazine, Podger comes off as a parody of the kind of heroic white youth who battle natives and fierce animals and rescue white females. The initiative seems promising, but later the magazine saved the expense of even a poorly paid inferior artist, with the easy solution for younger readers: between 1872 and 1883 it copied fifteen of Wilhelm Busch’s shorter stories (Bilderbogen), thereby becoming an early leader in a soon crowded race to steal from this ever-attractive source.

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Pl. 9-1-1 & Pl. 9-1-2. John tenniel, “how Mr Peter Piper accepted an invitation . . . ”

tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS  257

Pl. 9-1-2. John tenniel, “how Mr Peter Piper accepted an invitation . . . ”

258  tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS

Pl. 9-2-1 & Pl. 9-2-2. John tenniel, “how Mr Peter Piper enjoyed a day’s ‘pig-sticking,’” two Parts, Punch, v. xxiv, (March) 1853, pp. 91 and 101.

tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS  259

Pl. 9-2-2. John tenniel, “how Mr Peter Piper enjoyed a day’s ‘pig-sticking.’”

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Pl. 9-3-1 & Pl. 9-3-2. John tenniel, “how Mr Peter Piper tried his hand at Buffalo-shooting,” two Parts, Punch, v. xxiv, (March) 1853, pp. 111 and 121. tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS  261

Pl. 9-3-2. John tenniel, “how Mr Peter Piper tried his hand at Buffalo-shooting.”

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Pl. 9-4-1 & Pl. 9-4-2. John tenniel, “how Mr Peter Piper was induced to join in a Bear-hunt,” two Parts, Punch, v. xxiv, (april) 1853, pp. 140–141. tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS  263

Pl. 9-4-2. John tenniel, “how Mr Peter Piper was induced to join in a Bear-hunt.”

264  tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS

Pl. 9-5. John tenniel, “a run with a rantoone,” Punch’s Almanack for 1869.

tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS  265

Pl. 9-6. ernest griset, “hunting the rabbit à la Française,” Punch, november 23, 1867.

266  tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS

Pl. 9-7. ernest griset, “‘here’s Sport indeed!’” Punch, September 14, 1867.

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Pl. 9-8. ernest griset, “hunting the wild Boar,” Punch, May 11, 1867.

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Pl. 9-9. Briton riviere, “adventures of a Monastic Missionary,” Punch, February 1822, 1868.

tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS  269

Pl. 9-10-1 & Pl. 9-10-2. Briton riviere, “Mazeppa,” two Parts, Punch, January 25 and February 1, 1868.

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Pl. 9-10-2. Briton riviere, “Mazeppa,” Part 2.

tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS  271

Pl. 9-11-1 to Pl. 9-11-4. “Benjamin Podger on the himalayas,” The Boys of England, four Parts (September?) 1868, pp. 272, 283, 304, and 320). 272  tenniel and the wild BeaSt hunt in india; griSet’S and Podger’S elePhantS

Pl. 9-11-2. “Benjamin Podger on the himalayas,” Part 2.

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Pl. 9-11-3. “Benjamin Podger on the himalayas,” Part 3.

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Pl. 9-11-4. “Benjamin Podger on the himalayas,” Part 4.

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Chapter 10

CHARLES KEENE Fun with the Volunteers and Travels Abroad

“N

ever a humorous draftsman but a draftsman of humorous situations,” regarded as an “artist’s artist,” and according to Whistler “the greatest artist since Hogarth,”1 Charles Keene despite his 2,350 drawings for Punch and an international reputation, lay under the shadow of Leech and Du Maurier. Keene’s first drawing for Punch dates as early as 1851, when he was seen as a replacement for Doyle (and later for Leech). An eccentric bachelor, he was reluctant at first to sign his work, and he always depended on outside jokes. We feature here nevertheless many important, amusing social strips safely attributable to him certainly in design and probably in scenario. Neither a caricaturist in style nor a satirist in matter, his pride was in the subtlety of his atmospheric treatment of black and white. After making his last drawing for Punch in 1890, he left to his heirs the considerable sum of £30,000.

Volunteers Always fascinated by the military and obsessive about getting the details of uniforms just right, Keene was much energized by the Crimean war, especially the Siege of Sebastopol, but it was the Volunteers who stimulated a sustained series of single cartoons and several pictorial narratives, for which he became known. As the hunting field was to Leech, so the Volunteers were to Keene. Historians have tended to ignore the Volunteer movement, which represented the British response to the need, felt more acutely on the continent, in France and other European absolutist states

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(that is, most of them) for a larger standing army than that of the island which had traditionally resisted domestic militarization. In the mid-1860s, the ever-present fear of French expansionism under Napoleon III, war-like conditions generally on the continent (Russia versus Poland, Prussia versus Denmark, France in Italy), and the Civil War in the United States kept England on the alert, aware of neglecting land forces while complacent in her domination of the seas. Scare-mongering was fostered by the hard and well-publicized evidence that France was engaged in a heavy rearmament campaign. With the 400,000 French regulars against the 120,000-strong British army of whom only 37,000 were stationed in Britain, with the lingering malaise over the Crimean war and the Indian Mutiny, the numerical military inferiority vis-à-vis the French rang tocsins of alarm. Above all, as the press and the military command, led until his death in 1852 by the Duke of Wellington, hammered home, the French could boast of developing ironclad, steam-powered, screw-propelled ships capable of rapidly crossing the channel. Increasing the regular army and militia was always politically difficult, and even the easier and less expensive solution of strengthening fortification of London and the south coast was resented, as liable to increase taxation and defer needed reforms. The revival of the Volunteer movement in 1859 was prompted by memory of the two invasion scares we have visited, 1846–1848 and 1851–1852. A particular occasion of tension between the neighbors occurred in January 1858, on the heels of the attempted assassination of Napoleon III, by the Italian refugee Felice Orsini in that year, as soon as news spread that the French blamed Britain, where the bomb was allegedly made (in Birmingham), and where fellow conspirators had fled. In hindsight, this in itself was a mere pinprick. The French Porcupine (p. 103) threatened bigger pricks. Britain armed itself—with Volunteers. The movement was a sort of imitation of the French

Garde Nationale, without the history and demographic of that hallowed institution. The Volunteers filled Punch by 1860, peaking in that decade with four comic strips by Charles Keene 1863–1869, and (as we have seen) the active personal participation of the elderly George Cruikshank. The military, never far away in civilian society as social ornaments, as objects of (self-) flattery and flirtation, are in general not so conspicuous in English nineteenth-century cartoons as they are in France and Germany. The English tend to substitute the clergy, taboo as targets of satire in France and Germany, but here gently visible, often as objects of young female desire. The ever-prestigious British navy was absolutely off-limits as a subject of satire, and for practical reasons not involved in the Volunteer movement, which was a kind of home guard anyway. Keene’s numerous single cartoons and comic strips portray the paramilitary arm organized as Volunteers with critical awareness of and amusement at a sociopolitical phenomenon which was never truly widespread or considered newsworthy (only 0.6 percent of the male population joined). Although the satirical journals, the press generally, and the regular army hierarchy were largely hostile to the Volunteers (on grounds of expense), Punch’s attitude was more indulgent, more mildly amused than satirical, as our comic strips show. The recruits may be clumsy, but they are willing. Some cartoons show the Volunteers not in camp or on maneuvers in the field, as Keene has them in his mini-narratives, but penetrating the drawing room or practicing archery in the garden (cf. Fig. 10-1), exciting the attentions, admiration, and even emulation of the ladies, and juveniles. In a word, they enjoy a certain status. Ostensibly a rearguard in case of an invasion that was never even truly imminent, they had or were imagined to have internal uses, cast as a kind of accessory police force. In a Tenniel big cut, they practiced their drill in order the better to flog the vicious, rebellious imp of Irish

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Fig. 10-1. charles keene, “a hint to the ‘engaged ones’ of england,” Punch, May 28, 1859.

Fenianism (predecessors to the IRA). This stood opposite a Keene cartoon about the triviality of the Volunteer rule book (Punch, September 30, 1865). The Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the army 1855–1895, spoke of the Volunteers as “a very dangerous rabble,” liable to ruin the army.2 Rabble they were not. Their social composition, which has been minutely studied, was broadly middle class, like the core of the Punch readership, who would have identified friends, if not themselves, among the Volunteers (Punch sometimes uses the pronoun “we” to describe them). By the end of the Punch decade in which they flowered, the demography was that of the lower ranks declining toward the artisan class and away from the upper-middle or professional classes. In other words, the Volunteers were losing social prestige. The Volunteer officers, as in the regular army, tended to be of a higher class, but all Volunteers

were expected to be gentlemen, hence their sensitivity to the humiliation they suffer in the comic strips, humorous as it may be, at the hands of socially inferior professionals. A volunteer private, in civilian life a landlord, threatens to raise the rent on his tenant, a sergeant, if he doesn’t go easy on the drill. A diminutive, low-class officer commands and punishes a tall, gentlemanly recruit, who having not even seen him, failed to salute him (cartoons, June 27, 1862, and April 22, 1865). This sort of thing mattered more than the street hooligans’ habit of insulting paramilitary pretension in garb or manner. In the regular army, class distinctions were strictly observed; low-rank cannon-fodder and aristocratic officer were entirely separate castes. The middle-class Volunteers stood socially in between; and they were not supposed to engage in political arguments at social gatherings such as we see at the end of the summer Camp Life at Wimbledon (p. 294). Volunteers were motivated by patriotism as well the attractions of social companionship and the fun of learning to shoot a rifle, especially the new breech-loading kind. Otherwise the only technical skill on offer, apart from parade ground drill, was on horseback, if needed. Volunteers sacrificed leisure or work time, creature comforts—and money. To join up was not cheap: the annual subscription could be a guinea, equipment cost £10–15, a uniform around £5. Regarded by the press, army high command, and many politicians as “amusing playthings for the people,”3 the less exalted Volunteers found little compensation in social acceptance. That said, the institution never had to endure the pictorial ridicule heaped (earlier) by the French, notably Daumier, on their much better established and numerous French equivalent, the Garde Nationale, a critical factor in revolutions, but immune to ridicule under Louis-Napoleon. The leitmotif of cartoon and comic strip, obviously and predictably, is the Volunteers’ clumsiness and lack of inbred discipline. As a relative

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newcomer, Charles Keene first caught the public eye in Punch of the 1860s with his gentle mockery of the new patriotic institution, which he himself joined as a member of the South Middlesex Corps, attending maneuvers 1867–1871.4 A simple, kind, and somewhat lonely man of eccentric habits, he must have welcomed the companionship. His Private Gawky (said to be a self-portrait) manages accidentally to ruin his rifle, to his great shame, an incident extended over three issues and twenty-seven drawings (pp. 289–91). Cornet Saunders’s problems, limited to a single page, are the physical discomforts of camp life, exacerbated by a useless instruction manual. At the Portsmouth maneuvers, Private Jones undergoes mostly disconnected mishaps, with no happy ending. Paunchy Private Smith, at the Wimbledon camp, brings excessive luggage including a hip bath, which serves only to keep out the draught in his tent. Fatigues are followed by idleness. Smith at least gets a happy, convivial ending. At next year’s Wimbledon summer camp, Private Rickshaw has competitive ambitions but in vain (pp. 292–95). The pretend-army life, with its pretend-obedience and real incompetence, proved inadequate stimulus to Keene’s artistic imagination. The narrative format threw him on his own limited literary resources (since no borrowed jokes were involved). Earlier strips (from 1855) relating to physical clumsiness, being more seriously farcical, are funnier: Mr Spoonbill’s Experiences in the Art of Skating tracks the misfortune of the beginner who ventures and falls into the “dangerous” zone. Improvements in steel clamps from mid-century allowed for more flexibility of movement; young women were attracted to the pastime, with competitive men to court them. Competition was the watchword: the much-debated need for civil service applicants to be qualified by competitive examination for the first time occasioned this extended metaphor (p. 286). For more on the male clumsiness in handling firearms, see Popplewit (pp. 287–88).

Charles Keene: Travel in Brittany, Wales, and Scotland British recreational travel abroad, resuming after the heyday of the educational Grand Tour characteristic of the eighteenth century, took off after the end of the wars of the first Napoleon. What we now call tourism, which today sends millions abroad in every year was in its first bloom. The term tourism was coined at this time and the phenomenon accelerated in mid-century with the aid of organized collective and cut-price travel—the Cook’s Tour—and the dedicated guidebooks of Baedeker and Murray. In the late 1860s, a six-week round trip for two through Belgium, the Rhine Valley, Switzerland, and France would cost about £85, the annual income of a skilled worker. In the 1830s and ’40s Rodolphe Töpffer, head of a private school and master of the modern comic strip, was the fatherly guide to his lively group of schoolboys on Alpine tours. It was they who inspired some of his comic nonsense, verbal and physical. He took many occasions to poke fun at the pedantry of the guidebooks, the tourist apparatus, the make-believe avalanches, and the behavior of tourists who were so often British. I have described elsewhere in a 2007 biographical monograph Töpffer’s incomparable contribution to a growing industry that he promoted willy-nilly with his travel chronicles and in his novels. His picture stories also played their part in this process, but it was his first disciple the Frenchman Cham, who established, in the Charivari and in separate albums, primacy of the tall travel tale, which with him goes worldwide and hovers between silliness, quaint humor, and outright satire. Gustave Doré, again in the wake of Töpffer, also contributed baroque comedic tales mocking the tourist as he ranges geographically from the Rhine to Mont Blanc. The sober-minded Keene does not, like his predecessors, get drunk on the comedy of tourism, now full-fledged in the post-1848–1849 era.

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Brittany and Wales Keene as a tourist in Punch has modest ambitions and courts modest stimuli, one, set in Brittany, the other in Wales, are both modestly unsigned but surely by Keene. Brittany was picturesque but lacked the drama of the Alps, as worked by the French (francophone) caricaturists and, to exhaustion, by Albert Smith in his theatrical shows, described above. Nor was Keene about to rival Richard Doyle, who had just published his graphic novel covering whole swaths of the continent (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy). To be sure, the lower-level exploration of the Swiss Alps is tackled by Keene a bit later, summarily and under the necessary space restrictions (p. 299). A youth guides his father and portly mother (she on the back of a mule attached to its juvenile driver), through petty dangers and discomforts, a night in a hut, a grand view from a summit and near view of the original crossbow with which Tell killed his son (sic, in Altdorf no doubt), until they arrive back home safe and gratified. This is hors d’oeuvre. The three-part Brittany trip, based on Keene’s own personal experience, accompanied by friends, a London bank clerk and an artist, starts with a sickening channel crossing (pp. 296–98). Brittany was considered romantically primitive in a way that would later attract French Postimpressionist artists. It was seen as a picturesque, old-fashioned, backward province full of charming folklore and traditions upheld by the predominant peasantry. The unromantic, satirical view of a peasantry mixing cunning with stupidity would arrive in the Histoires Campagnardes of Léonce Petit, an extensive graphic novelette series of the 1870s and 1880s.5 There is no equivalent of the peasantry as protagonists in the hyperurbanized British Isles. Keene should have stayed longer abroad, invited more adventures. As it is, he has little to tell us about the Breton people as such; instead we have the stereotypical tedium of the French douane, hiking and transportation in its different modes, a little

street shopping, one visit to a picturesque interior of which we see only the exterior—and the obligatory sketching. The only personal encounter with a native Breton is effectively aborted by the artist’s “thumb-biting” timidity and lack of the language (French? He would not attempt Breton), yielding from behind to his enviable friend who converses with a pretty girl (a vendor?) with a basket. She is singled out, by Keene’s biographer Layard, as the centerpiece of the page, and as a refutation of the “foolish fallacy” that Keene was unable to draw a beautiful woman.6 The timidity is Keene’s: as the lifelong bachelor, he was shy and rather unsociable, not known to have had any love affairs, despite his very real musical talents. He should at the least have sketched the pretty Breton in close-up as Doyle does in a comparable situation, but the encounter is the prelude to departure. The tourism seems perfunctory, as is the choice for some sketching of a nondescript street corner with farmhouse buildings, deserted but for a tiny figure peeping from an attic, alarmed at this “intrusion.” At least Keene’s tourist does not suffer arrest as a spy like Doyle’s. The sketching is the sine qua non of tourism, as adjacent Punch articles tell us, under the heading “How, when and where? Or the modern Tourist’s guide to the continent” (Punch, October 31 and November 14, 1856), which play on the clichés, reminding travelers to bring a supply of pencils in order to turn the tour into a “carica-tour.” Given the lack of incident, the best one can say of Keene’s pencil in this case is that it has engaged in welcome contrasts of graphic style. The very next week (was Brittany a success? It feels abbreviated) was followed by Keene’s Mr Perks’ Mountain Experiences (in Wales), Pls. 10-11-1 and 10-11-2 (pp. 300–301). Wales like Scotland was a relatively new, neglected discovery for the English. The graphic variations in the atmosphere of background effects that enliven the Brittany story are now lacking. The objective is the modest peak of

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Mount Snowdon. Unfortunately, despite his complicated knapsack, the soaping of his stockings (to prevent blisters), and a good breakfast, the seeker of solitude cannot escape the crowds at the summit and the attendant debris. The trash left by tourists already afflicted the much-traveled Mont Blanc (as it does Mount Everest today—a forty-five-day expedition was needed to clean up the “world’s highest garbage dump” and retrieve twelve tons of trash). Keene’s story peters out with two chance acquaintance-companions, one pleasant and the other unpleasant. The final image, of Perks’s boots before the trip, seems pointless, kicking in with an expectation for more, unrequited. Some degree of artistic aspiration is coded in the album he carries, but does not use. Walking was the physically challenging part of Brittany; on Mount Snowden it is the crowds. Was Keene a bad sailor? He devotes two pages of strips in 1866 and 1868 to the discomforts of travel by water, whether on the Thames as far as Chelsea or on a cruise in open waters, where the cramming of panels rhymes with the dislodging of boat parts, and conveys well the accidental or incidental discomforts of small-boat travel (p. 303).

Scotland After Wales, we enter ever-romantic Scotland, into the wilds of which a female artist, Miss Lavinia Brounjones, ventures, again as told by Keene anonymously but now much more substantially, over ten weekly successive half-page designs (pp. 304–9). The sportsman sought to kill game in Scotland; the artist sought pictures of the killing of game, and wild scenery. Conquests both, in different registers. Tourism quâ exploration is a kind of conquest, as is art-tourism. France, Wales, Scotland were all ancient conquests of the English, Scotland most recently in terms of English penetration and occupation, pioneered by the royal family. The occupation had its violent aspects. English aristocrats (like the Scottish

clan chiefs) destroyed a traditional rural economy to favor sheep farming and deer hunting, the effects of which are still felt and resented today. The contretemps suffered by Leech (q.v.) on his salmon-fishing expedition from the Duke of Atholl, owner of vast estates in Scotland, was a warning to suspected intruders. Scotland was formally annexed to the crown in 1707, and treated as a hunting playground, and with it went the artistic conquest, led by the queen herself, who loved to sketch there. Miss Lavinia however—thin, bespectacled, plain-featured and elderly, evidently an unmarriageable spinster, physically ill-adapted to adventure—dares go it alone, and seeks no violence. She makes considerable preparations for her “remote farmhouse.” Bravely, she bathes in a nearby well, at night, and to model her picture of “Cattle Lifting,” she finds a ram that the local barefoot shepherd boy allows to escape. The next morning it reappears, nightmarishly, lying on her bed accompanied by smaller farmyard creatures. Failing to understand the Gaelic of a huge local Scot, Miss Lavinia finds herself lifted bodily across a little waterfall (out of context, this action looks like an abduction if not a rape), only to find herself confronting another, more threatening Gaelic-speaking Scot who objects to her intention to sketch the ruin of an ancient fort. Further unpleasantness is threatened by a herd of highland cattle besieging her. We do not learn how scared she is by all this, but assume she has had to abort her sketching campaign. How alienated were the human city dwellers from domestic animals! The obstacles animal and human to Miss Brounjones’s sketching mirror those facing the female artist at this time. Historically excluded from art schools and exhibitions, despite any commercial success, usually in watercolors, she was always “the amateur.” Braving the discomforts and dangers of nature, Lavinia fails in her mission. And yet, she is probably a member of the Society of Female Artists founded in 1855, and envious of her real-life sister artist, Georgina Bowers, admitted to the Punch

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fraternity with successful performance there since 1866, the same year fictional Lavinia shows up. Miss Brounjones would have known that really superior skills could bring fame and fortune—as manifested by Swiss-born Angelica Kaufman R.A., in England; she also would have been acquainted with the many French artists inspired by Rosa Bonheur, in Scotland in the 1850s, also an animal specialist, feminist, and Légion d’Honneur recipient, who sold her works to English patrons. Scotland coded as a threat to the invader, even an innocent one, playful as it must seem in this comic medium, inevitably perpetuated social prejudice and carried a moral. Keene’s Lavinia story is a precursor to James Brown’s McNab of that Ilk (Judy, 1876–1888), the first continuing ethnic stereotype in the history of the comic strip. The protagonist McNab is a wild, drunken, blaspheming, and ever-irascible not to say lethally violent man, living in a lawless Scotland to fight the Muckle Laird. He stands for more than the local Scottish landlord: as I elaborate elsewhere, both Laird and enemy McNab are caricatures of typical Scottish smallholders, who had reason to be angry: starved of land, displaced

in favor of deer for shooting, their property rights defied and disrespected.7 These are the modest comic strip contributions to the British tourist’s small complicities with imperial conquest, in the shadow of the well-publicized big-name explorers of the day. Travel writing flourished in periodicals, fiction, and the records of real-life adventure, some of it exotic. The comic strip takes a share in satisfying the lust for vicarious travel. Travel was nothing without illustration; the picture story, the comic book is nothing without travel. Travel is the essence from Tarzan to Tintin. Of the British traveler above all, “the great colonizer of the world,” all kinds of travel and exploration, the urge to “attack, conquer, defeat a pass or summit,” have been viewed as a kind of sub-imperialist conquest.8 The scramble for Africa beckoned: Sloper in Savage Africa (p. 423) is an early scrambler. Significantly, it is the imperial freshman explorer from Germany toward the end of the century who generates most comic strips relating to African exploration, affirming the aggressive, late-coming German penetration of the continent.

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Pl. 10-1-1 to Pl. 10-1-3. charles keene, “Mr Spoonbill’s experiences in the art of Skating,” in three Parts, Punch (February) 1855, pp. 70, 80, and 90. c h a r l e S k e e n e : F u n w i t h t h e v o l u n t e e r S a n d t r av e l S a B r o a d     2 8 3

Pl. 10-1-2. charles keene, “Mr Spoonbill’s experiences in the art of Skating,” Part 2.

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Pl. 10-1-3. charles keene, “Mr Spoonbill’s experiences in the art of Skating,” Part 3.

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Pl. 10-2. charles keene, “civil Service examinations,” Punch, January 11, 1868.

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Pl. 10-3-1 & Pl. 10-3-2. charles keene, “how Mr Popplewit enjoyed (?) a day’s rook Shooting,” two Parts, Punch, v. xxviii, (June), 1868, pp. 232 and 242. c h a r l e S k e e n e : F u n w i t h t h e v o l u n t e e r S a n d t r av e l S a B r o a d     2 8 7

Pl. 10-3-2. charles keene, “how Mr Popplewit enjoyed (?) a day’s rook Shooting,” Part 2.

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Pl. 10-4-1 to Pl. 10-4-3. charles keene, “Passages in the life of a volunteer—how Private gawky expended his rifle,” three Parts, Punch, april 25, May 2 and 16, 1863. c h a r l e S k e e n e : F u n w i t h t h e v o l u n t e e r S a n d t r av e l S a B r o a d     2 8 9

Pl. 10-4-2. charles keene, “Passages in the life of a volunteer—how Private gawky expended his rifle,” Part 2.

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Pl. 10-4-3. charles keene, “Passages in the life of a volunteer—how Private gawky expended his rifle,” Part 3.

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Pl. 10-5. charles keene, “cornet Saunter’s experiences of Musketry drill,” Punch, april 28, 1866.

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Pl. 10-6. charles keene, “reminiscences of Portsmouth,” Punch, May 2, 1868.

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Pl. 10-7. charles keene, “camp-life at wimbledon,” Punch, July 25, 1868.

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Pl. 10-8. charles keene, “wimbledon,” Punch, July 16, 1869.

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Pl. 10-9-1 to Pl. 10-9-3. charles keene, “englishmen in Brittany,” in three Parts, Punch, September 6, 13, and 20, 1856.

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Pl. 10-9-2. charles keene, “englishmen in Brittany,” Part 2.

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Pl. 10-9-3. charles keene, “englishmen in Brittany,” Part 3.

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Pl. 10-10. charles keene, “it was our tom persuaded us . . . up the alps,” (reads from bottom right to left), Punch’s Almanack for 1868.

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Pl. 10-11-1 & Pl. 10-11-2. charles keene, “Mr Perks’s Mountain experiences,” two Parts, Punch, September 27 and october 11, 1856.

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Pl. 10-11-2. charles keene, “Mr Perks’s Mountain experiences,” Part 2.

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Pl. 10-12. charles keene, “a Perilous Journey by water,” Punch, July 28, 1866.

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Pl. 10-13. charles keene, “the Blue water-cure,” Punch’s Almanack for 1868.

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Pl. 10-14-1 to Pl. 10-14-6. charles keene, “Miss lavinia Brounjones,” ten Parts, here combined on six pages, Punch, august 18, 25, September 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, and october 6, 13, 20. 3 0 4     c h a r l e S k e e n e : F u n w i t h t h e v o l u n t e e r S a n d t r av e l S a B r o a d

Pl. 10-14-2. charles keene, “Miss lavinia Brounjones,” nos. 3 and 4.

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Pl. 10-14-3. charles keene, “Miss lavinia Brounjones,” nos. 5 and 6.

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Pl. 10-14-4. charles keene, “Miss lavinia Brounjones,” nos. 7 and 8.

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Pl. 10-14-5. charles keene, “Miss lavinia Brounjones,” no. 9.

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Pl. 10-14-6. charles keene, “Miss lavinia Brounjones,” no. 10.

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Chapter 11

DU MAURIER Darwin and a Taste for Tall

T

he nine or so picture stories that Du Maurier produced for Punch during his forty years with the magazine are concentrated in the few years 1866 to 1870/1871, after which he returned to single cartoons only, until his death in 1894. Behind all of the narratives there lie, more and less directly, the theories of Charles Darwin relating to evolution and “survival of the fittest,” as they were popularized from the late 1860s. To these may be added some direct knowledge among English artists (including Marie Duval) of the Darwinian caricaturist par excellence, Wilhelm Busch. Franco-British George Du Maurier (1834–1896), of French aristocratic heritage, studied art in Paris and was appointed staff artist with Punch in 1865 to replace Leech. Thereafter he contributed two cartoons a week, typically of humorous domestic and drawing scenes featuring tall, statuesque women who play upon a very personal obsession, strange in its intensity and longevity: height as the quintessence of physical beauty, especially in women. This too was an unexpected product of his Darwinism, as we shall see later. As the women get taller, and gain in status, the men shrink (Fig. 11-1).

A Taste for Tall Du Maurier’s first picture story showing how little Tom Tit marries a giantess (p. 320) was run over twenty-one drawings and three pages of as many issues in one month (January 1866). The strip is untitled, but introduces the real-life Chinese giant called Chang, whom Du Maurier had

310

Fig. 11-1. du Maurier, diminutive Young Swell and tall Young lady, Punch, February 15, 1862.

recently seen on stage in London (stage name Chang Woo Gow, real name Zhan Schichai), and would admire again when he visited the Paris Exposition of 1867. There Chang’s sensational stature attracted more excitement from Du Maurier as Punch envoy writing under the name Titwillow than the Exposition pictures that were his remit. Titwillow was the pseudonym that Du Maurier chose in self-deprecation of his short stature and used for his prose pieces in the magazine, and in the fall of that year for a short, obscure picture narrative headed “Titwillow for Tatwillow” (Punch, October 6, 1866, not reproduced). Titwillow compensates for the loss of his dundreary whiskers, which (seems to) render him less imposing than his wife, by buying a very tall French-style top hat, to which his wife responds with high-heeled shoes and a tall chignon; defeated, “Napoleon Titwillow” shaves his face completely. In the first of his picture stories we reproduce, the normal-sized “Tom Tit,” after entertaining the giants Chang and Anak (the name of a biblical giant),

concludes that next to being a giant oneself, the best thing is to be the husband of a giantess. Magically, Tom Tit finds and marries “a very fine girl” who had saved him from a fierce bull. Standing about eight feet tall (the size of the original Chang), she easily subdues the bull like a dog. A fine musician and a sensation in Rotten Row (astride an elephant), the “gentle giant” dominates the most elegant society and proves of practical help to her painter-husband. She seizes burglars like small children and physically restrains her husband when he runs overtime on a speech. In the last scene, promising a continuation not given, she reclines clear across the living room floor, together with her children, one outsize, the other tiny. For the following year’s Almanack, Du Maurier offered A Simple Story (p. 323),the cautionary tale of a flageolet player who tries to emulate the muscularity of men said (in fiction) to be attractive to ladies. By strenuous exercise he achieves this, shows off successfully, but having caught cold loses all he

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has gained, including his skill on the flageolet. This absurd tale innovates the precocious use of verses (by Du Maurier himself) below each of the twelve vignettes. Precocious too is Du Maurier’s sense that a comic strip might dispense with words altogether. The Giant Guardsman (pp. 324–26) uses only chapter numbers as in a novel, but no captions. The wordless or “silent” strip, pioneered by Wilhelm Busch, was new to Britain.1 Guards regiments were known (and chosen) for their height, and considered socially elite, but here the military courtship is with the lower class from the servant’s hall—a classic French scenario. The amorous approach of the guard, whose extreme height allows him to peer over high walls, involves an ill-fated attempt to conceal tobacco fumes from a prying neighbor, a burned tablecloth, and a happy ending. This little anecdote, whose logic is left obscure while the pictures offer striking atmospheric and nocturnal effects, was evidently given to Du Maurier by a friend, and explained in a couple of letters addressed to the editor, and printed on the page backing the last page of drawings. One letter was from a Zachariah Boggles, the other from Your Artist’s Friend who maligns the “hateful meddling old prig” Boggles. These letters seem, in the first place, designed to comment on or compensate for Du Maurier’s wordlessness, without filling the gaps or solving the ambiguities we find in reading the pictures. According to his principal biographer, being “free of the tyranny of the caption” allowed Du Maurier to be more “fresh and spontaneous” in the illustration.2 The Giant Guardsman was preceded a few months earlier by The Philosopher’s Revenge, A Story without Words, in sixteen “chapters” (pp. 327–28) where visualized sound effects serve to substitute, as it were, for captions. The female pianist, who is much taller than her neighbor, a diminutive male philosopher, wields a more noxious auditory weapon to penetrate the shared dividing wall. The pianist

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causes the philosopher to run through a gamut of movements and emotions, a kind of close tracking associated with Wilhelm Busch and climaxing in a Buschian phasic oscillation of pain (note the repetition of limbs in chapter 3). Finally, he resorts to an even stronger weapon bought from a passing organ grinder, the fearful noise from which the pianist fears is issuing from her own instrument—causing her to flee the premises. The use of the frightful street barrel-organ may have been prompted by Leech’s well-known phobia. Darwin, as well as proto-Darwinian Wilhelm Busch,3 lies directly, I think, behind the story of animal miscegenation in The Egg-Poacher (A tale of Country Life, in 3 vols.) (pp. 330–31), where, over minimal (actually, redundant) captions, the cunning poacher, a male frog, imagines the subsuming of millennia of evolution in as it were three volumes of description, each in fact a page eight chapters long (i.e., one drawing each). Against a backdrop of delicately rendered river landscape and riverside effects, an ambitious anthropomorphic frog swallows a whole duck egg, but escaping the mother’s grief, falls violently ill. Still swollen to many times his natural size, he chases a giant snail up a tree (out of curiosity?) but falls, breaking the egg inside him. The obstinate recidivist, having swallowed another egg, is butted by mother duck, who makes him lie out his “pregnancy” until a duckling (-cum froglet?) emerges from the shell in the frog’s belly. One intuits that it is the duck, a creature superior in size and strength, who brings the frog and hybrid (?) progeny forcibly to the altar. Female power? (Un)Natural Selection? The struggle for life between different species, duck and frog, lies at one point of the evolutionary spectrum; at the other end is the struggle between two vastly different creatures of the bird species (vulture and farmyard cock). This is the subject of Du Maurier’s minimally captioned John Brown and the Cid (in Two Acts) (pp. 332–33). Positing, very indirectly, an attempt to engage in cheating

on the course of nature, this picture story recounts the Cid’s defeat of the Yankee (i.e., US northerner) sailors’ fighting cock, and the attendant gambling loss. Smarting at the dual humiliation, the Yankees introduce a tame eagle called John Brown, whose feathers are clipped and shorn in the usual way with fighting cocks, in order to remove anatomically vulnerable parts. In a (cunning? or blatant?) deception, the eagle pretends to be supine and helpless, attracting the challenge of the erstwhile victor, who finds himself instantly devoured in exactly half a second—such bouts were timed and could last anything from seconds to an hour—whereupon the victorious trio of owners, topped by the glowering eagle, march drunkenly home. The cockfight was a handy metaphor for Tenniel in depicting the war between France and Austria in 1859. Ten years later John Brown and the Cid must refer to the recent real human-life bloody cockfight, the US Civil War, when the abolitionist revolutionary named John Brown became a martyr, hero, and marching song, and the antagonists were Northerners pitched against Southerners. In the Du Maurier strip the latter, the losers in history, see themselves as cock-of-the-walk under their cock named after a legendary Spanish hero. Punch, along with the press and British public generally, was initially sympathetic to the South, became then of divided partisanship, but finally accepted the outcome of history, as that of the prevalence of superior arms, industrial weight, and up to a point morality—in some sense, Du Maurier’s stronger Northern eagle fighting a mere Southern rooster. But another, more local context must be sought in the controversy surrounding a practice illegal but still highly popular in parts of Britain, as in many parts of the world today. While setting the fight probably in the southern United States (see the huge-brimmed Mexican hat), Du Maurier cannot escape the reaction of his readers, who knowing little about the great conflict dividing the US, might have perceived the civil war itself as ridiculous and

barbarous as cockfighting, reeking of an ancient custom not uprooted from a more civilized country, their own. Du Maurier’s American cockfight was a political cartoon (such as he was never called on to design) extended into a comic strip. Cockfighting, once so universally popular an entertainment in England, had taken a moral beating in the age of the Enlightenment along with other animal blood sports like bull, bear, and dog baiting, and cruelty to animals generally. Some of the finest minds then and since had denounced such animal sports, as indeed did William Hogarth in the first two of his Four Stages of Cruelty and his Cockpit. The defenders and practitioners of the pastime, which was attended by much ruinous gambling and violent passions, as Hogarth shows, claimed that this “most English of sports” induced courage, virility, and patriotism. To crown a groundswell of opposition, in which the RSPCA joined, an act was passed in 1835 prohibiting cockfighting (blood sports with larger animals had already been banned). In 1850, Sporting Magazine, formerly sympathetic, condemned cockfighting as “a great crime and hideous outrage.”4 In the 1860s, cockfighting went underground and apparently increased, evading police and prosecution while also earning endorsement from the likes of Admiral Ross, “dictator of the Turf ” (i.e., via the Jockey Club) as “the strengthener of Empire.” Cockfighting, amazingly, retained its admirers as the quintessentially masculine, patriotic, and British sport akin to fox hunting. Du Maurier’s stage direction gives a hint of universality: set in “Foreign Parts (or thereabouts),” this cockfight announces a taste for a home-grown kind of exotica fertilized by Darwinian fantasies so distant from the run-of-themill drawing-room jokes for which Du Maurier is best known. Cockfighting today, illegal in Britain and in most of the United States including the state of New York, in 2014 was subject to the biggest single bust ever in that state, when 3,000 birds were seized and seventy humans arrested.

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As for the human cockfight: A Student’s Duel at Heidelbronn (p. 334) purports to show Natural Selection at work between supposedly equal members of the same species, at the most trivial, symbolic, and (to British eyes) perfectly absurd level. A tradition, very much alive in the nineteenth century although banned in modern Germany, impelled status-seeking German university students to engage in duels, in order to demonstrate physical bravery by giving and/or receiving a (preferably) small but scarifying cut. Their heavy protective bundling-up reminds one of Tenniel’s Tweedledum and Tweedeldee in Alice through the Looking Glass (1872, Fig. 11-2), where they are accoutered like children in a pretend nursery fight. Can the evolution of woman into gigantism be a quasi-monstrous Darwinian mutation in the human species, akin to that of prehistoric monsters, the bones of which had been on display since mid-century? Du Maurier growing up as a child in France had nightmares featuring massive prehistoric monsters (see his contemporaneous cartoon A Little Christmas Dream, Fig. 11-3). At the age of six, he was given by a French schoolmaster and geologist “hauntingly terrific pictures of antediluvian reptiles battling in primeval slime.”5 Such monsters certainly prompted the nightmarish behavior of Jenkins’s cab-horse (p. 337), which crashes and becomes a terrifying and modernist-distorted monster as it bursts through the street, scattering pedestrians in all directions, to the point we are left wondering whether poor Jenkins will lose his reason altogether. But no: finally, he prepares to take his revenge with a huge knife and fork upon the poor scraggy animal, standing as docile as in the first scene, but now surrounded by eager butchers from the knacker’s yard. Behind them a solemn chorus intones an extract from Thackeray’s humorous poem about Little Billee, who, in the poem, as the youngest of three starving sailors is (like the horse) threatened with extinction, to be eaten by the other two. (Little Billee is also the name of a principal character in Du

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Maurier’s Trilby.) A more benign view of the horse in Punch the same year analyses in one coordinated, interpenetrating image their supposed pattern of leg movements jumping a fence—supposed because this drawing appeared two years before Eadweard Muybridge and Jules Marey began their scientific photographic analyses of movement (Fig. 11-4). The artist’s sense of nature sporting us with “unnatural” or happenstance miscegenation of species is expressed with grotesque abandon in Du Maurier’s Specimens not yet Included in the Collection at Regent’s Park (p. 338). Although this is not a narrative sequence, but a grouping of eight distinct fantastic combinations, each claiming a scientific label, I include it here as an important step in the “Darwinization” of comic art, and nonsensification. From the 1880s, cartoonists would be playing with metamorphoses (the word used, like the name of Darwin himself in this connection), which tracked, in stages, the gradual transmogrification of some commonplace object into one related but quite different in form and function (burglar into pistol, horse into cat’s meat).6 Such graphic sleight of hand revives in Du Maurier a childhood memory of “fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats, gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters which devoured each other.”7 Du Maurier’s version of what would become a mechanical and unsubtle kind of graphic trick acquires depth (takes off, one might say) in that ancient and futuristic vision of humans actually flying through the air. By mid-century, the idea had become practice, indeed a commonplace spectacle, and object of fascination in caricature, primarily in air-balloon adventures imagined best and most fantastically by Cham, for instance. Personal aerial travel by balloon in some form is the starting point in Du Maurier’s Suggestions for Aerial Navigation (p. 339), as by inflatable India rubber boat, or (less absurd, more mythic) as harnessed to some huge bird. But now “by an extension of Mr

Fig. 11-2. John tenniel, tweedledum and tweedledee. (From lewis carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1871.)

Fig. 11-3. du Maurier, “a little christmas dream,” Punch, december 26, 1868.

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Fig. 11-4. du Maurier, “Farewell to earth!” Punch, november 7, 1868.

Darwin’s theory” man is capable of developing, in the necessary stages, the avian wings himself, before turning into a full-fledged bird. Beware of what you wish for: the instrument you use and love for your musical flights may end up turning against you, as imagined by the same artist in The Insect World (p. 340). This visualizes a cruel insectoid life-anddeath struggle between a beetle-like bass player and his beloved instrument, which ends up crushing and/ or devouring him in a kind of copulatory embrace.

Stature as Theme and Obsession Darwin posited the law that human races changed over time; for proof, look how industrialization, improved nutrition, and medical practice brought with them (in a very short, measurable time!) an increase in stature. We return to Du Maurier’s obsessive theme: height, especially in women, as the pinnacle of beauty. As he was so often quoted as

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claiming, the artist had through his drawings helped women (of the upper classes of course) to increase their stature in reality by several inches. (Could one by the same token hold cartoonist Gary Larson today, with his ubiquitously obese characters, responsible for adding all those inches to the national waistline?). Thackeray, at six-foot four, was much admired for his height. Du Maurier was himself under average height (we don’t know by how much), but interviewed at the end of his life he is described as “diminutive.”8 All this no doubt fueled his lifelong formula tall is good and beautiful, but the roots are surely deeper, deeper than the knowledge that his beloved mother, his wife Emma, and eldest daughter were all of statuesque beauty. Emma, according to her granddaughter novelist Daphne Du Maurier, was “one of the loveliest creatures of her time,” “immortalized over and over again in the pictures of Punch.”9 Of statuesque beauty likewise was the magical Trilby, heroine of the novel of that name, and “almost gi-

gantic.” In Peter Ibbetson the Duchess of Towers is (literally) the dream-like supreme ideal of tall beauty (see Fig. 11-5). As drawn by the artist, her head is in a ratio of about one-tenth of her whole body; the norm is one-eighth. Du Maurier reverts to the theme as if it were a talisman of all that is good and desirable in humanity. The duchess’s height is explained by French ancestry, shared with Peter Ibbetson himself, who creates her in dreams and himself exceeds even her height (never exactly given, but that of “a giantess,” with his at “two metres plus”—6 foot 4 inches?) and muscles to match, which Ibbetson uses to kill an evil man. Du Maurier even owned the biggest available dog, a Saint Bernard he called Chang after the Chinese giant referred to in his first picture story. In his art, it was noted that “it is almost only the ugly people who are small, and the small people who are ugly.”10 Peter Ibbetson is a long hymn, too overwrought, even turgid for our taste today, to the creative power of dreaming, written at century’s end when Freud was analyzing this new imaginative world. The metamorphic power of Darwinian evolution seemed to unveil a huge dream of millions of years of history. In Leech, desirable females were small, their stature an important aspect of their prettiness. Du Maurier changed that, as did Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson Girl,” the American Beauty, who more than just prettiness, required height, which gave power, and added to the general perception that with increased height, women increased in political and social muscle. The New Woman was emancipated and tall. New Englishwomen were reputed taller than, therefore superior to Frenchwomen; Cham (who spent much time in England) used the stereotype of the tall English female, with the important modifiers that she was also toothy and downright ugly. Du Maurier’s Madame Seraskier in Peter Ibbetson, who “topped my tall mother by more than half a head” and was so sacredly beautiful that she was “painful to look at, for me,” prompts the peculiar

Fig. 11-5. du Maurier, the duchess of towers. (From Peter Ibbetson.)

quantification that height “magnifies beauty on a scale of geometric progression—2, 4, 8, 16, 32—for every consecutive inch, between five feet five, let us say, and five feet ten or eleven.”11 The average height of an upper-class woman at this date was probably well under five-foot five. The average upper-class Englishman measured a few inches more, but says Du Maurier in Peter Ibbetson, his superior height did not make him less likely to be haughty, ugly, and speak awful French. In the Du Maurier drawing room, woman reigned supreme over the male. Whether subtle, like Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns, or more brash like Mrs Lyon-Hunter, she presided over a world which may have (in Du Maurier if not in reality) avoided politics, but set a tone of decorum and sophistication for Victorian social life generally. Du Maurier, who himself reigned for so many years supreme in drawing-room cartoons, may be seen as an offset to a certain prevailing hostility to female advancement, to women’s rights, their access to higher professions, to the New (and taller) Woman. Punch, given to

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mockery of feminism and the “New Woman,” is definitely in a media-wide mainstream, but in the many Du Maurier jokes deflating male pomposity and delusions of control, there was more amusement than actual hostile antagonism to female empowerment, short of the vote, of course. Lacking the necessary scholarly analysis, it is safest to say that Punch’s attitudes vis-à-vis female emancipation are, with Du Maurier’s fantasies, mixed, complex, and inconsistent.

ly rich, endowed with the most magnificent height imaginable (“six foot eight in his pumps”), invites the attractive young Miss Lightfoot to dance. Miss Lightfoot replies (“to her mother’s horror”) that she cannot accept because she is too tight-laced and too tight-shod. The super-aristocratic bachelor is so entranced by this candid confession that on the spot, he offers her his hand in marriage.12

Tight-lacing

Mr Punch would merge his hatred of tight-lacing with his ridicule of the “The Girl of the Period,” who is a kind of youthful, rebellious feminist. Du Maurier has much fun at the expense of the super-tight dress of the “cuirasse period” (1870s ff.), in which elegant aristocrats indulge, to the point that they cannot sit down or climb stairs, but still manage to play tennis at which game they prove the superiority of their beauty over the “finest French actresses”—and lazy, languid, effete young men. So: in Du Maurier Tall, Slender Amazon looks down on Puny Male. At the risk of digression, I hope to add a refinement or correction to a simplistic view of Du Maurier on women, in the considerable literature on him. A closer look reveals him as an important counterfoil to Punch’s misogyny, though he shares with all other cartoonists that ugliest (and most British, I think) of satiric reflexes: the constant, mean-spirited recourse to the “humor” of elderly spinsters, by definition ugly but always under the illusion they are or could be attractive to men. The prevalence of unmarried females of all ages was known at the time to be due to the reluctance of men to get married, and caused great social and sexual stress that the women’s movement tried to alleviate by breaking into male-dominated professions. We mentioned above Georgina Bowers, Punch’s first regular female cartoonist, featuring the New Woman, the energetic, competent sportswoman; but more representative of the standard female ste-

But in one area, in one aspect of female fashion, the oddities of which are otherwise regarded as commonplace objects of fun, Punch became bitter and angry. This was tight-lacing, against which Punch inveighed continuously from the 1840s onward, reaching climactic paroxysms of fury about 1869, against a habit that seemed armor-plated against satire; not coincidentally this was the year when female correspondence defending the practice, in Samuel Beeton’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, began to surface. Du Maurier, ignoring the prevailing and editorial opinion that tight-lacing was supreme female folly—ugly, sinful, dangerous to mental and physical health, and (worst of all) maternity—took a benign view of a habit he tended to associate with short, lower-class girls (like pretty ’Andsome ’Arriet the ’Ousemaid, for instance), and later raised to the status of a foible of some high-class women, who defended their habit as less dangerous than obesity. Du Maurier even came to admire it as a legitimate aspect of female beauty, or aspiration to beauty, having scarcely to exaggerate the universal graphic convention of slender female waists. He did many cartoons on the subject, which remained highly controversial, one of which brings us back to our topic of height, this time on a male. A “Modest Youth,” in fact the most eligible young bachelor imaginable, of the most aristocratic lineage imaginable, immense-

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Punch: Women and Misogyny

reotype is Charles Keene’s amateur artist Lavinia Brounjones (pp. 304–9), homely, frustrated of ambition, but bravely unaccompanied on her expedition to the wilds of Scotland. Reading Du Maurier’s A Simple Story (mentioned above, p. 323), which is about the importance of men being big and strong, I chanced on an (unrelated?) tiny two-line “funny” filler at the bottom of the page, which runs “An unaccountable fact: It is astonishing what ugly women you do sometimes see with a ring on the left fourth finger.” Fact? Or factoid? After 1870, Du Maurier did virtually no more graphic narratives for Punch, nor did the magazine carry any by other artists into the near future, except for a few by Linley Sambourne 1871–1872. Nor for that matter did Punch print any more thematic

series, except for a remarkable, unique oddity by Du Maurier, who in March to May 1877 devised seven installments with four designs each, illustrating nonsense limericks, all composed in good French.13 They fit with the artist’s “nonsensical” sub-Darwinian combinations we have seen earlier, and the tendency in anarchic strips of the late 1860s we explore later. Thus do the examples of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear indirectly enliven a weekly become tired and repetitious. Another, hitherto unregarded author who deserves a place in the literary-artistic nonsense department is a woman on whom this book ends: Marie Duval, whose pseudonymous, luxurious album A Rare and Choice Collection of Queens and Kings and Other Things, “by R. A. The Princess Hesse-Schwartz,” is hilarious.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 1 9

Pl. 11-1-1 to Pl. 11-1-3. george du Maurier, “tom tit entertains chang and anak . . .” three Parts, Punch, January 6, 13, and 20.

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Pl. 11-1-2. george du Maurier, “tom tit entertains chang and anak . . .” Part 2.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 2 1

Pl. 11-1-3. george du Maurier, “tom tit entertains chang and anak . . .” Part 3.

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Pl. 11-2. du Maurier, “a Simple Story,” Punch’s Almanack for 1868.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 2 3

Pl. 11-3-1 to Pl. 11-3-3. du Maurier, “the giant guardsman,” three Parts, Punch, July 10, 24 and august 7, 1869.

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Pl. 11-3-2. du Maurier, “the giant guardsman,” Part 2.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 2 5

Pl. 11-3-3. du Maurier, “the giant guardsman,” Part 3.

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Pl. 11-4-1 & Pl. 11-4-2. du Maurier, “the Philosopher’s revenge,” two Parts, Punch, March 13 and 27, 1869.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 2 7

Pl. 11-4-2. du Maurier, “the Philosopher’s revenge,” Part 2.

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Pl. 11-5-1 to Pl. 11-5-3. du Maurier, “the egg-Poacher,” three Parts, Punch, april 10, 24, and May 8, 1869.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 2 9

Pl. 11-5-2. du Maurier, “the egg-Poacher,” Part 2.

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Pl. 11-5-3. du Maurier, “the egg-Poacher,” Part 3.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 3 1

Pl. 11-6-1 & Pl. 11-6-2. du Maurier, “John Brown and the cid,” in two Parts, Punch, May 29 and June 12.

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Pl. 11-6-2. du Maurier, “John Brown and the cid,” Part 2.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 3 3

Pl. 11-7. du Maurier, “recollections from abroad. (a Student’s duel at heidelbonn.)” Punch, January 8, 1870.

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Pl. 11-8-1 to Pl. 11-8-3. du Maurier, “don’t look too much before you leap,” three Parts, Punch, February 1, 15, 22, and 29, 1868.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 3 5

Pl. 11-8-2. du Maurier, “don’t look too much before you leap,” Part 2.

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Pl. 11-8-3. du Maurier, “don’t look too much before you leap,” Part 3.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 3 7

Pl. 11-9. du Maurier, “Specimens not yet included in the collection at regent’s Park,” Punch, august 14, 1869.

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Pl. 11-10. du Maurier, “Suggestions for aerial navigation,” Punch’s Almanack for 1871.

d u M a u r i e r : da r w i n a n d a ta S t e F o r ta l l     3 3 9

Pl. 11-11. du Maurier, “the insect world,” Punch, February 5, 1870.

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Chapter 12

MCCONNELL’S WILDERSPIN IN TOWN TALK, 1858–1859

T

own Talk was launched in May 1858, a weekly with twelve pages for a mere penny: a cheap price enabled by the abolition a few years earlier of the “taxes on knowledge” (i.e., paper and postage). Despite the sensationally low price and availability—it boasted of being on sale at every railway station—the magazine closed just eighteen months later, on November 14, 1859. Its editor was Watts Phillips, author of the leading political cartoons, whose socialist, radical sympathies we remember from Diogenes. The demand for reform was always on the agenda. The cartoon in the first issue asks where is a poor waif to go, when harassed by the police to move on, “The Prison or the School?” It was followed by “Pity the Poor Sempstress,” who in her misery contemplates suicide off a bridge (June 12). Openly pro-poor at a time when The Times had only just admitted the existence of poverty (as Town Talk sardonically noted), the magazine was also virulently anti-French, or rather, anti-Napoleon III, as one would expect from left-leaning Watts Phillips. The tyrant was continuously lambasted in big cartoons: having eclipsed the sun of the Republic, he is envisioned secretly preparing explosives against Britain and mounting a fleet to invade. In the August 7 issue, he is a vicious spider pretending to welcome the British royal family; his France is a Delila rendering the English Samson impotent . . . and many more of the kind. It so happens that we know how this “lesser” magazine made its little niche in literary history. Like other journalistic newcomers, it liked to boost sales with a bit of scandal, here affecting the Good and Great. Young Edmund Yates, minor journalist, novelist, dramatist, and biographer of

342

Albert Smith, wrote a hostile, “mischievous” article on Thackeray under the sobriquet “The Lounger,” which provoked that eminent novelist to attempt to have fellow member Yates thrown out of the Garrick Club, causing major convulsions. Long-lasting repercussions extended to Yates’s patron, Charles Dickens, and the latter’s much-publicized denial of an affair with Ellen Ternan. All this must have succeeded in improving circulation. Like many of the new comic magazines, Town Talk ran installment fiction, together with regular columns of humorous social commentary by our old friend Albert Smith, under the title “The Idler upon Town.” Smith was honored (October 3) with a full-page portrait, just after Dickens. Smith’s prose serial ran concurrently with a major graphic serial, William McConnell’s The Adventures of Mr Wilderspin on his Journey through Life (pp. 346–69). This provided (with Yates’s piece on Thackeray), a long-lasting entertainment, announced as “an important new attraction” destined to run in twenty-three episodes through as many inside centerspreads, from December 11, 1858, to May 14, 1859, setting an impressive record total for a magazine picture story: 193 drawings, the heft of a graphic novel. McConnell had pushed out of its central position the second or second half of the Watts Phillips weekly cartoon; theirs were virtually the only graphics. The new magazine’s receptivity to the picture story may have been noted by Punch’s own John Leech, who put his comic strip Money Maketh the Man in the Christmas album, as noted. After this the magazine announced a much-improved New Series, raised the price to 2d and the size to sixteen pages. In the ensuing months, there were a few desultory comic strips: The Life of the Ballet Girl All the Year Round (unsigned), and socially passive series by McConnell reminiscent of Richard Doyle’s, called “Amusements of the People,” “Pictures of London,” and “Phases of Life.” But by October the paper was dying.

Watts Phillips’s anti-Bonapartism dated back to his couple of years with Punch (1850–1852); McConnell defected, feeling underpaid and languishing under the shadow of John Leech. With Punch, McConnell had suffered under “contumelious and shabby treatment meted out to him by editor Mark Lemon.”1 Among other, varied work in book and press illustration, in 1857 and 1858 he produced some mediocre comic strips for the Illustrated Times, before learning that Town Talk, a new, radical magazine edited by his old friend Watts Phillips, was willing to take on a “graphic novel” of a length Punch would have disallowed. Honored in a full page by Punch historian Spielmann, McConnell is described, fittingly for the son of a tailor, as always exceptionally well dressed, “a handsome little fellow, bright, alert, and full of originality,” dying prematurely of consumption in 1867. Thus was cut short a career that “promised considerably more than it achieved,” and before he could fulfill his promise, as Spielmann asserts, ignoring the Wilderspin graphic novel and his contribution as pillar of Town Talk. The popularity of Wilderspin, at any rate, is indicated in the long prose extrapolation and complete reproductions that were immediately published by Andrew Halliday (1830–1877). This Scottish journalist, dramatist, and regular contributor to Dickens’s journal All the Year Round was an editor of Town Talk, and credited with the eponymous novel-length text of the Wilderspin story from which McConnell’s name is omitted. Was Halliday’s also the original scenario, or did he “write up to” ideas and drawings given him by McConnell? We can only guess at the manner of a collaboration that turned a true graphic novel into a conventional illustrated fiction. The illustrated book was out well before the end of the same year and another edition was soon published with a prolix title matching that of the text.2 In the following description, we note a small detail where the writer, presumably Halliday, can say what the artist cannot (and remain decent), but

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 4 3

we stick mainly to the graphic version as originally printed in Town Talk. The two versions adopt the episodic pattern common to both fiction and comic strip art in Britain and France. As the first graphic novel to appear in a journal, we give it here in précis. Its episodic, picaresque construction is all too evident, but we can admire the physical energy it exudes, and the quest for nonstop variety of action and locale. The conventional opening, an inheritance followed by the descent into worldly pleasures with hints of debauchery, is something of a cliché (we remember it from Crindle in Man in the Moon). Wilderspin, “a Railway Clerk with ideas above his station,” becomes suddenly an heir enriched by a distant relation in Australia (the relentless wordplay throughout the captions is par for the course). Pretentious but naïve, Wilderspin wastes his “great expectations” in the usual way: on clothes, skittles (a gambling game), and the theater. In the book, Halliday’s descriptions of “oriental pleasures” in the “pleasure shops of the Caliph’s fine palaces,” and “the Turkish divan” attended by cigar-smoking houris, in the theatrical Haymarket district where prostitutes notoriously abounded, constituted a warning hinted at in the “Moral for Young Men,” added at the bottom of the page. These pleasures offer a spicier potential than McConnell could get away with in his drawings. We are left to imagine the nature of our hero’s temptation when he is accosted “at a very late hour” and “at a dark corner” by a “lady of great personal attractions” who turns out to be the accomplice in a garotting that leaves him senseless (pp. 351). Garotting was a much-feared and publicized danger at this time. In Halliday’s novel the hero is left half-panicked and half-drunk by too much temptation. Purchasing the right to play Richard III (a common practice of stage-struck youth) Wilderspin’s private rehearsals cause great alarm in his lodgings, and provoke his audience to vegetabular contempt as the curtain goes down on the first (and

3 4 4     M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K

only) night (p. 353). The sudden appearance of his lower-class extended family, each a charming cameo, has no consequences (p. 354), but his joining in a chase to stop a pickpocket ends in a dog tearing his Inverness cloak—a proud possession trailing wings that give speed and virtually airborne flight (p. 355). Distinct incidents self-contained on single pages, flanking raucous rendition by our Scottish artist of a Scots New Year party (p. 356), are strung together in a way customary in the genre. The artist tries to remedy the discontinuity the next week, by ending an odd but funny ovine obstacle to his amorous pursuit, on an editorial hint: “The ‘party’ will be pursued in our next” (p. 357). The “party” is an attractive female whom Wilderspin espies by chance in the street, and whom he follows, against practical obstacles, to the door of her house (p. 358). While the chance encounter is a cliché of the amorous pursuit we remember from the Crindle story, Wilderspin successfully following his target to the door of her house is an incident the author might have picked up from the wellknown real-life story of how John Leech found the girl he would marry. Punch cognoscenti saw her as the “pretty young girl” who became a staple of the Leech cartoon. McConnell—artistically never his match—is less successful than Leech at rendering this prettiness, on the small scale required, with the wide-set eyes and rosebud mouth. In a crinoline revealing pretty feet and ankles, and busy with the doorknocker, she is unaware of being followed by Wilderspin, or of the conniving wink of the doorknocker after she closes the door. But she responds to the invitation that her maid and a street vendor are bribed by Wilderspin to deliver. The “party’s” big brother and friend take exception, and poor Wilderspin is challenged to a duel, with a Scottish companion from the New Year party to act as second. Unprepared and terrified as Wilderspin is, a blind chance shot fells his opponent and causes the victor to flee. The duel is a cliché

of fiction and art, comic or painted, from Töpffer’s “Duel pour Rire” in Jabot to a Gérôme painting exhibited at this moment in London. Cunningly switching clothes with a vagrant peasant (p. 360), sleeping rough with the animals, the fugitive from the illegal duel (which will prove a hoax) arrives across the channel to be harassed by police and hotel touts, having somehow switched from rustic clothes to decent urban garb and his favorite Inverness cape. Back home in his native parish our hero stands for Parliament and wins raucously on a reform (pro-government) platform against his opponent, the “bloated aristocrat.” Politicians from both sides court him, as do agents with “bills” for election expenses, etc., etc.—extortionate bills for expenses were another commonplace complaint of the time. (Anthony Trollope, foolishly standing for Beverley in Yorkshire, a seat reputed for electoral skullduggery, spent £1,000 that he was bound to lose.) Assailed by debt as he is, Wilderspin gets an invitation to a royal levee (p. 363)—remembered perhaps from the ironic conjunction in Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress. Wilderspin receives deputations to repeal the (very topical) Taxes on Knowledge and other bills which his superiors spurn. His maiden speech in parliament is to a small and sleepy audience. Unseated on charges of bribery and corruption and losing his parliamentary immunity, Wilderspin is arrested and incarcerated for debt, a practice not effectively abolished until 1869. The system allows him some small freedoms such as playing ball games in the prison yard (as shown in the background). Venturing outside the prison he is harassed by his creditors in person. (Bleeding through with print from the same page overleaf, we see coincidentally in a full-page cartoon, an analogous jail-bird type, ruined and in despair from his gambling.) The gallery of prison types includes some of the more peculiar examples probably drawn from newspaper reports, followed by a convivial celebration of his discharge, to bid farewell to his prison mates.

Another amorous adventure, with “a young female of prepossessing appearance,” this time in Greenwich Park, and a ninepenny worth of tea and shrimps, gets him a beating by the lady’s “regular young man.” Wilderspin resolves to take up boxing with a noted practitioner who knocks him out— leaving him floored in a daze of pain complete with a precocious “Buschian” oscillation pattern.3 After further pugilistic abuse our hero is left quite broken and depressed (in the novel suicidal) to dream about happier childhood scenes. In a not-so-romantic but quick-fire conclusion, the requisite nuptials are knotted with a major creditor, Wilderspin’s plump, middle-aged, widowed landlady. Happy ending to a life, with its mix of social clichés and warnings against political adventurism new to the comic strip at this time. After the demise of Town Talk McConnell found in the Comic News, eight or twelve poor-quality pages for a penny, another, also short-lived (1863–1864) outlet. The Adventures of Mr Wellington Fipps, which ran from August 15 to September 26, 1863, in seven episodes and forty-two drawings, recounts how after a clandestine kiss in a railway tunnel and a tumble into the water, his amour goes nowhere. In the Highlands there is more excitement, as Fipps tries the games (p. 346). For the record, culled from the volume lying in tatters in the British Library, before it disappears altogether, I list some other comic strip titles appearing in the journal which obviously took the genre seriously, although they are poorly done and occasionally meaningless. Several are by William Brunton (cartoonist for Fun from 1861): A Little Sport in Algeria in seven episodes, features some exotic animals; others by him bear the titles Toddles and the Strange Bed, Adventures of Mr Thomas Toddles at the Prize Fight, and Uncle Fidget’s Christmas Night in a Strange Bed in the Country. Another alluring title is Harrowing Adventures of a Member of the Ghost Club. Like other casualties of the market, the Comic News fades away with the comic strip ascendant but evanescent.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 4 5

Pl. 12-1. william Mcconnell, “Mr Swellington Fipps in the highlands,” Part 5 (of 7), The Comic News, September 19, 1863. (last caption reads, “encounters the lady of the Manor, who descends .  .  . who brings him to grief.”) 3 4 6     M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K

Pl. 12-2-1 to 12-2-23. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” 23 Parts, Town Talk, december 11, 18, 25, 1858; January 1, 8, 15, 22, 29, 1859. From december 1858, weekly through May 14, 1859. M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 4 7

Pl. 12-2-2. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 2.

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Pl. 12-2-3. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 3.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 4 9

Pl. 12-2-4. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 4.

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Pl. 12-2-5. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 5.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 5 1

Pl. 12-2-6. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 6.

3 5 2     M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K

Pl. 12-2-7. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 7.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 5 3

Pl. 12-2-8. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 8.

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Pl. 12-2-9. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 9.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 5 5

Pl. 12-2-10. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 10.

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Pl. 12-2-11. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 11.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 5 7

Pl. 12-2-12. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 12.

3 5 8     M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K

Pl. 12-2-13. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 13.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 5 9

Pl. 12-2-14. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 14.

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Pl. 12-2-15. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 15.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 6 1

Pl. 12-2-16. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 16.

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Pl. 12-2-17. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 17.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 6 3

Pl. 12-2-18. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 18.

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Pl. 12-2-19. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 19.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 6 5

Pl. 12-2-20. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 20.

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Pl. 12-2-21. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 21.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 67

Pl. 12-2-22. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 22.

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Pl. 12-2-23. william Mcconnell, “the adventures of Mr. wilderspin on his Journey through life,” Part 23.

M c c o n n e l l’ S w i l d e r S P i n i n T OW N TA L K     3 6 9

Chapter 13

THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS AND OTHER JOURNALS The Illustrated London News

F

ounded May 14, 1842, The Illustrated London News (ILN) was the first of its kind: a fully illustrated news weekly, with sixteen pages (three of advertisements), and in the first issue thirty-two engravings, all for 6d. An instant success, by the end of the year the ILN had reached 60,000 copies sold, and thereafter, on special occasions like Christmas, attained six figures. The (un-illustrated) Times had a circulation of 70,000, Punch less. The ILN founder-editor was Herbert Ingram, with Henry Vizetelly, who soon left to launch the rival but short-lived Pictorial Times. After toying with the idea of a sensationalist, crime-oriented organ, Ingram founded this entirely new and very respectable concept, which proved an immediate and lasting success. Noting the success of Punch, the ILN added a Christmas treat of humorous drawings that may have included some (unsigned) by Cham, taken from illustrations for English editions or versions of his children’s books.1 The ILN had a French imitator, L’Illustration, which we remember for its helping to launch picture stories by Töpffer and Cham, and its enthusiastic embrace throughout the 1840s of regular caricature, a genre which the ILN apparently disdained, and left to other short-lived papers with which Ingram was associated. At most the ILN took advantage of Gavarni’s 1848 arrival in England to use many of his highly reputed social types, with timely “revolutionary types” added in. The paucity of comic strips (only four) in the Illustrated London News over our period, down to 1870, may be due, in part, to the graphic dominance of Sir John Gilbert, who had little use for caricature, and

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was paid enormous sums for his illustrations to the Christmas specials, into which some comic stuff (by Leech and Keene) was very grudgingly admitted.2 The Christmas season comic strips in the ILN may have been few but reached and were shared by a greater audience, perhaps up to 100,000, greater than the Punch New Year Almanacks, and much greater, surely, than that of any of the other periodicals in our survey here. Comic drawing was infrequent until December 13, 1851, when, as a near- Christmas–New Year seasonal treat, Cuthbert Bede (aka Rev. Edward Bradley), recounted The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman, over full pages, in two parts, the second appearing a month later (p. 375– 76). Possessed of various literary skills displayed in verse, novel, and essays for Punch, ILN, and other journals, and some training in wood-engraving from George Cruikshank, Bede/Bradley seems to have conceived his story from the start as an extensive comic strip, a form that Punch editor Mark Lemon encouraged. The first page recounts in a conventional way a student’s departure from family in a crowded coach for Oxford, and meeting the head of his college. The second page deals with some sightseeing, disappointment with living conditions, observing misconduct in chapel, and attempting to impress some young ladies in the street. Read so far, the story is not exactly exciting, and the drawing is very defective, especially in the faces. At this point Bede either got tired of drawing, or else (more likely) lost the prospect of continued space in the ILN, and decided to go for a full-length novel, using and supplementing the existing illustrations, and adding more in the usual way.3 After circulating the book to various publishers, he found one who reluctantly agreed to take it on, and was astonished at its instant success, eliciting two volumes of sequel. While the drawings get even worse, the chronicle of student life at Oxford remains of some documentary interest, especially since the author got it second hand, having himself

gone to the new Durham University. Oxbridge, still the cynosure of British universities, was undergoing a serious, modernizing reform, in curriculum and admissions, admitting more science and religious dissidents. This does not appear in the novel, an awkwardly constructed, creaky bildungsroman. The next year’s Christmas brought to the Illustrated London News an obviously child-oriented theme, Watts Phillips’s Plum Pudding a Dream of Christmas (p. 377), where the plum pudding is personified in a dream, overeating it pun-punished. Reader response did not at this point encourage further such Christmassy frolics. The appropriate seasonal “family” entertainment in the 1850s favored the entirely conventional: comic theater, sentimental and religious art, and music scores. A long gap brings us to 1868, where Frenchtrained young Frederick Barnard, a longtime, prolific contributor to ILN, later illustrator of Dickens, commemorated the (children’s) Christmas pantomime season, with Precocious Peter, or What Became of the Naughty Little Boy who Would go Behind the Scenes (p. 378). This seasonal feature was perhaps prompted by the opposite page showing the rehearsal of a pantomime in the Crystal Palace, with spectators crowded behind the musicians. The boy’s fantasy of penetrating a pantomime, hopefully leading to a career on the stage, is scarcely realized before it turns nightmare-savage. The arbitrary waxing and waning of the groups of thirty-six numbered, wordless scenes seems appropriate to the semiconscious dream-like flow. For the curious, or puzzled, an explanation is given a few pages further on, in doggerel rhyme, whereby tiny black scenes 18, 19, 22 are meant to show “utter darkness,” followed by a torture room with rack and strappado (this not shown—too gruesome?) and “Dreadful Beings send him to the central haunt of the Roaring demons of the Dismal Abyss who steal his money for a beer.” Finally, the boy falls asleep, it is indeed all a dream, down to the stage carpenter bundling him into a monstrous cannon to be blown into the middle of

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next week. This sensational stunt was a feature of circus and Christmas pantomime, and a “boyish ecstasy” of Dickens.4 The following Christmas, Mr Titbury’s Turkey (p. 379) also by Barnard, wordless again, was even busier, casually chaotic in a new freedom of arrangement. More dream-work: the strip evokes the compulsion of a man who buys a turkey in order to carry out what seems (I am guessing here) to be the turkey’s bidding after it comes to haunt him in a dream, in hopes of laying the bird at the feet of his lady-love. In impetuous haste he knocks down all the street types who come his way, including at the end a policeman—who will likely arrest him. Christmas pudding, turkey, and goose (see below) may appear trivial themes, but they had gained a certain status as emblems of British prosperity and the right of all, poor and rich alike (vide Dickens).

The Illustrated Times Henry Vizetelly’s Pictorial Times, an imitator and rival to the ILN (1843–1848), started out using French material (by Delaroche and Vernet). In January 1844, Cham, sponsored by Vizetelly as the only artist signing, made several irreverent drawings caricaturing the royal family in its visit to Eu (France), which caused a minor diplomatic incident. In its boasted “graphic history of the world” the magazine found no room for comic strips, while resorting to narrative spicing with bits of Hogarth, and Cruikshank’s The Bottle (1847). The abolition of the newspaper stamp in 1855 allowed for cheaper production and prices. At just two pence, the Illustrated Times (1855–1872) clearly aimed at a lower-class audience; it claimed to offer “many hundred engravings of the chief events of the day,” and was dedicated to social reform. It featured in all about nine comic strips, of which we illustrate three. As in the ILN, the season of joyfulness was leavened with tales of woe, but of an all-too-top-

ical and frightening kind, with physical disasters, a murder imagined, and an all-too-real mugging. The relatively superior and well-established Charles Bennett, who gave decorations to Punch from 1865, documents a very real and at the time much-publicized terror in 1856: garroting. How Hob and Nobb Returning Home from a Christmas Party were Garotted (p. 380) reflects the widespread press campaign against this vicious and often lethal style of street robbery, which involved (semi-)strangulation from behind. It is illustrated in close-up, together with the extreme means of defense invented by Hob and Nobb, the homeward bound couple. (Punch, more practical, offered a stiff all-around collar garnished with huge spikes.) The ending is meant to be reassuring: the garotters the couple fear, in the latter’s drunken state, turn out to be each other. A special Garotters Act was passed in 1862. This reassurance makes its own point, shared by the commentators: the garotting scare, not unlike terrorist crime today, causes social fear out of proportion to the actual incidence of such attacks. No reassurance, however, for the foreign guest, a Frenchman called “Mossoo” Gogo (p. 381), evidently Jewish, in the Christmas special for 1863, which tells how Gogo is invited to dine at a country cottage, gets lost, robbed, and is left unconscious, found by police, and fined for sleeping outside. The Christmas treat for 1867, Adventures of Bob Scraper and his friend Chubb (p. 382), drawn by the unknown Charles Robinson, frameless and reading in a flowing circular motion, with singular viewpoints, recounts the pair’s perils with a horse, and having to walk for hours in the snow after disastrous misdirections. Scraper and Chubb are taken for burglars before arriving in the early hours of the morning. The frameless design is hard to read, a harbinger of the eventual dropping of the grid hitherto de rigueur. Seasonal in another sense are An Election for a Little Borough by Charles A. Doyle, about elec-

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toral corruption (in fifteen scenes, May 14, 1859), and Our Artist’s Experience of a Scotch Mist, thirteen unsigned scenes about the failures of a hunter (November 15, 1856). A Story about a Roasted Goose, by J. Hollingshead and William McConnell, dated December 19, 1857, represents a very minor woe and relief, compared with the horrors of the Indian Mutiny dominating closely up to that point. McConnell, who now found a better outlet for the much more ambitious project we have visited in Town Talk, celebrated the following Christmas for the Illustrated Times with a mild warning, a nineteen-scene strip called The Sweets of Home and their effects on Master Banting, about a boy who overeats, gets fat, then thin again, and fat again, all at high speed. For Christmas 1869 Robinson offered the dangers of (penny-farthing-ish) velocipedes en route to a party, to be greeted on arrival in a terrible mess by pretty girls. Finally, for Christmas 1870 in a bumper issue, Warwick Reynolds describes the theft and fate of the seasonal dinner. Meanwhile, in 1863, the Illustrated Times went Darwinian, well before Du Maurier and Punch, and in a form we deem virtually a subgenre of caricature: the metamorphosis. From May to October, Charles Bennett gradually turned cat into old lady, monkey into child, donkey into gentleman, hedgehog into owl into pedant, etc. Bennett, who explicitly dedicated his drawings to Dr. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and Natural Selection, was an early (the earliest?) player of what became a kind of parlor game that did not catch on until 1872, probably prompted by Darwin’s just published Descent of Man. This easy-to-play game of transformation involved basic drawing skills and allowed for a limited kind of random invention, deus ludens, that Darwinian theory seemed to countenance. The famous theories of evolution began to achieve widespread acceptance, and the following year Punch imitator Judy systematized a series called “Metamorphoses by a Maniac.”5

Will o’ the Wisp Will o’ the Wisp lasted from September 12, 1867, to May 17, 1871. The regular lead political cartoon by John Proctor aimed to impress in size alone: double-spread or fold-out. The politics of the magazine were conservative, but the comic strips, which started after eight months of its existence and continued to the end, numbering over a dozen or so, were farcical, novel in theme and style, although by artists of unknown identity. They announce, with Marie Duval’s Ally Sloper in Judy, a new era of fin-de-siècle levity and childish freedom. Since Proctor was also chief cartoonist for early Judy, which also specialized in the comic strip, it may be that he helped edit both magazines. The first strip called The Rivals, A Romance of Regent’s Park (p. 383) is a close, abbreviated copy, in reverse, from the French comic La Lune, by Crafty (Victor Gérusez). The borrowing here reminds us that the French were a continuing model for the comic strip which had become a regular feature in several new French comic magazines; there was apparently no sequel to this appropriation, which may have been designed to test the ground in England for the new genre. The Rivals, succinct and silly, is typically French in its amorous, murderous violence. This sets the tone of the fourteen or so comic strips in Will o’ the Wisp, which lack any thematic coherence, but share a tendency toward farcical violence, irrationality, unpredictability, and inconsequentiality, with varying degrees of virtually abstract anatomical distortions. The quest for graphic social realism espoused by Punch has gone by the board. Proceeding now in roughly chronological order: Mr Bicycle Jones’s failure to control the new-fangled bicycle of the period, which tips him headfirst into the mud (p. 384) is interesting for the precocious oscillation patterns derived, no doubt via Busch. An untitled piece we will call Timmins and the Thief (p. 385) recounts how a nervous householder

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mistakes chimney sweeps for burglars. Opposite, in the same issue, The Little Great Grand Duke of Sloshenboshenstein (p. 386) must be, on style, by Marie Duval, the new (female!) artist borrowed from Judy. This “Royal Highness,” head of some tiny German state, probably a student, smoking an immense student-style pipe, rudely refuses to put it out at the command of twin authorities, his mother and the head of the church. A nonstory really, in eight pictures, redeemed by the novel, crude outline style, and its foreign locale. Likewise by Duval must be Emma’s Uncle Obadiah (p. 387) about the selfishness and rudeness of an uncle, who is ironically forgiven, and his will (presumably) left abeyant. The characters here begin to resemble those of the “classic” Ally Sloper as established in Judy nearly two years earlier, with the soon-to-be-famous names—here precociously present—in Charles Ross’s Some of the Mysteries of “Loan and Discount” (p. 389), where Ally and his sidekick Iky Mo find their métier, financial fraud. The Cooperative Ketchup Company by (initialed M., artist unknown) is another kind of commercial fraud, its components deserving the vandalism it suffered (p. 388). In 1870 and the first six months of 1871, the near-moribund magazine brought in new and promising artists, with styles and themes sufficiently new and curious to make us take a small step beyond our chronological limit. “FID” signs or initials, insistently—as a newcomer?—every scene of

A Fit of the Blues (p. 390), about a neophyte boating accident. This succeeds for its simplified, clean linear style, inspired, I think, by Wilhelm Busch. FID’s The Rural Mystery (p. 391) is a lunar fantasy, about village gullibility, a thieving stranger, and a cosmic illusionist who absconds with the village treasury riding a fish moon-ward. FID’s Sicatee (p.392) follows the career of an artist from childhood graffiti to Turner-esque slapdash. Further prophetic of the development of caricature toward a kind of self-sufficiency and eccentricity, and marked by a certain pointed pointlessness and willful nonsensicality, is a quartet by one artist signing the interlaced initials JR (or SR or RS or JS), who favors extreme anatomical distortions and mutilations (pp. 393–96). Stagger and Blowhard brings extreme childish acrobatics. The matchstick flailing legs in Betsy the Blighted and The Bald Baron come to us from the same artist, in parodies of pantomime melodrama at its very worst. The satire of the drunken Red-hot Republican agitator who blows up his own mother, at a time when Republicanism in Britain had gained a certain traction, is obviously not to be taken seriously. We end on a precocious jolt, Hair-dressing by Electricity (p. 397), initialed by Charles Bennett, known for his quizzicalities in Punch. This looks well ahead, predating the severe distortions of the human frame caused by uncontrollable technological forces.6

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Pl. 13-1-1 & Pl. 13-1-2. cuthbert Bede (i.e. rev. edward Bradley) “the adventures of Mr verdant green, an oxford Freshman,” Parts i and ii (suspended), The Illustrated London News, december 13, 1851, and January 17, 1852.

Pl. 13-1-2. cuthbert Bede (i.e. rev. edward Bradley) “the adventures of Mr verdant green, an oxford Freshman,” Part 2.

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Pl. 13-2. watts Phillips, “Plum-Pudding: a dream of christmas,” The Illustrated London News, december 25, 1852.

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Pl. 13-3. Frederick Barnard, “Precocious Peter, or what Became of the naughty little Boy who would go Behind the Scenes,” The Illustrated London News, december 26, 1868. 3 7 8     T H E I L LU S T R AT E D LO N D O N N E W S a n d ot h e r J o u r n a l S

Pl. 13-4. Frederick Barnard, “Mr titbury’s turkey,” The Illustrated London News, december 18, 1869.

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Pl. 13-5. charles Bennett, “how hob and nobb returning home from a christmas Party were garotted,” Illustrated Times, december 20, 1856.

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Pl. 13-6. (artist unknown), “how ‘Mossoo’ gogo, having received an invitation to dine . . .” Illustrated Times, december 19, 1863.

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Pl. 13-7. c. robinson (artist), “adventures of Bob Scraper and his friend chubb on christmas day.” Illustrated Times, december 21, 1867.

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Pl. 13-8. “the rivals. a romance of regent’s Park” (copied from La Lune (France), with omissions), Will-o’-the-Wisp, april 24, 1869.

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Pl. 13-9. “extracts from the diary of Mr. Bicycle Jones,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, May 29, 1869.

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Pl. 13-10. timmins and the thief, Will-o’-the-Wisp, July 1, 1869.

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Pl. 13-11. Marie duval, “the little grand duke of Sloshenboshenstein,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, July 1, 1869.

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Pl. 13-12. Marie duval, “emma’s uncle obadiah,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, June 5, 1869.

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Pl. 13-13. charles ross, “Some of the Mysteries of loan and discount,” Judy, august 14, 1867.

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Pl. 13-14. william Mcconnell, “the co-operative ketchup company unlimited,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, april 2, 1870.

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Pl. 13-15. Fid, “a Fit of the Blues,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, March 29, 1871.

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Pl. 13-16. Fid, “the rural Mystery,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, april 5, 1871.

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Pl. 13-17. Fid, “Sicatee, or three artful acts in the art-less life of an artist,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, May 17, 1871.

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Pl. 13-18. Jr (?), “Stagger and Blowhard, or, the city clerk and the cruel caution,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, May 3, 1871.

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Pl. 13-19. Jr (?), “Betsy the Blighted,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, april 19, 1871.

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Pl. 13-20. Jr (?), “the Bald Baron; or, the False heir and the absent will,” Will-o’-the-Wisp, May 10, 1871.

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Pl. 13-21. Jr (?), “how Braggs became a red-hot republican, and how he was put out,” Will-o’ the-Wisp, april 26, 1871.

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Pl. 13-22. charles Bennett, “hairdressing by electricity,” Punch, March 31, 1866.

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Chapter 14

AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING Marie Duval in Judy, 1867–1870, with Percy Cruikshank on the Franco-Prussian War Marie Duval Creates Ally Sloper

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e end our exploration at a beginning: the advent of the ineffable character Ally Sloper, developed by Marie Duval. This remarkable artist established herself in Judy, a new magazine (1867–1910), at the tail end of our chosen era culminating in 1870, although transcending by many years that moment with her popularization of Ally in Judy, which was later cemented in reprints in a new magazine named after him. A mass audience and a mass popularity beckoned. Our ending years here coincide with those ending a prolonged period of national prosperity—the GNP almost doubled from 1851 to 1871—and of a European peace, crashing horribly with the Franco-Prussian War 1870–1871. Duval became Britain’s and indeed Europe’s first fully professional female caricaturist, self-taught, and the (virtual) creator of Ally Sloper, Europe’s first truly enduring continuing character. His effect in England may be compared with that of Busch’s Max und Moritz. Marie Duval (real name Isabella Emily Louisa Tessier, of French heritage, 1847–1890) started a professional career as a young actress known on the English stage for her specialization in male impersonation, particularly in the role of Jack Sheppard, thief, escapologist, and hero of folklore and novels. In this role she suffered a crippling accident to her

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leg involving stage machinery, which left her giving caricature her full attention. Ally Sloper, a disreputable fraudster, first appeared in Judy in 1869, two years after the new magazine’s founding. Although initially conceived and drawn by Duval’s long-term partner, magazine editor Charles Ross, Ally was developed (and signed) by Marie Duval (or MD), who brought the character over the decade to unheard-of levels of popularity, to become and remain for many years a genuine cultural-sociological phenomenon. Ross’s role in the recurrence of the character, the frequency of his editorial encouragement, seems to be indeterminate; it is likely that he sometimes supplied captions, ideas, and jokes to her drawings. The root of Ally’s popularity lay in his contempt for the prevailing work ethic. His prototype was surely Daumier-Philipon’s Robert Macaire, by now a classic of caricature, and well known in England. As Macaire had a side-kick in Bertrand, Ally had his Iky Mo. Macaire’s frauds lay primarily in the world of big business; Ally Sloper’s lay lower in the social scale. The work ethic, practically mythologized by the likes of Samuel Smiles’s best-selling Self Help (1859), which was directed at “improving” the lower classes, was ripe for mockery. Ally was soon to be joined by other continuing disreputable, work-shy character types in the rival magazine Fun: James Sullivan’s British Working Man recurrent from 1875, with his follow-up series from 1876, The British Tradesman, and James Brown’s McNab of that Ilk (Judy, 1876–1888). There was, however, a great difference in these artists’ moral approach to their grifters: Sullivan’s characters, who impersonate different types of malefaction from episode to episode, are meant to be suffered and condemned as a menace to good business, while the business of the violently antisocial McNab is to be forever at loggerheads with his neighbors and his overlord, the Muckle Laird. Ironically, McNab received the sponsorship (in the form of full-page

advertisements in Judy) of John Begg Lochnager Whiskey. Ally Sloper’s sponsor was the great public to which he endeared himself. Ally is above all inventive, always looking for new kinds of fraud. Although often drunk he remained (unlike McNab) essentially nonviolent, admirable if not actually lovable in the ingenuity of his frauds, which tended to rebound on him unprofitably. The just-cited newcomers achieved collected album status, without ever approaching the level of Ally’s popularity.1 As a favorite recurrent character, Ally may be seen as a precursor to Sherlock Holmes (born 1887), an expert in criminality on the other, right side of the law. Judy was the perfect vehicle for a character such as Ally: at two pence, a cheaper version of Punch, it aimed at a lower-class audience with a greater female readership than the older magazine. Punch proclaimed a dubious political neutrality; Judy inclined to a soft Toryism. Its manifesto, issued in verse on May Day 1867, affirmed a commitment to (soft) reformism, and to a “Working Class [that] shall have our special care . . . their ills we’ll share. The weak and helpless shall not be forgot . . . we shall not plead in vain / For suffering when ’neath the lash of pain.” The only graphic evidence I have found for this generous attitude in Judy’s early years is a big cartoon offered as a kind of Christmas celebration for 1869, showing the Fairy of Plenitude drawing back (or forward?) a curtain on Want, Misery, and Despair, lurking about a workhouse labeled “Full.” Duval’s Ally Sloper, if originating as an ex-proletarian vagabond, identifies with the working class insofar as his chief aim in life is to transcend it and avoid honest labor, and the pain of retribution which might ensue from his frauds. He is the perfect contradiction of Smiles and editorial Judy. He offers dreams of escape (and nightmares of retribution) on behalf of many lower-middle-class readers whom I take to be the core readership, restless and insecure, mired in the humdrum necessity of making ends

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meet. Some lower-class female readers must have shared their husbands’ discontents and aspirations and dreamt of starting small businesses. Economic prosperity encouraged the opening of small shops by and for women. Judy’s appeal to the female reader, with its unusual pretense of an eponymous female owner-editor called Judy, must give us pause—one may hazard the guess that among the rush of periodical titles that lived and died in the mid-century, few were really edited by women—or even pretended to be as Judy does. Should we even call Judy editor “she” as “she” calls herself? We may discard the early, mischievous attribution of all Ally drawings and concepts to editor Ross (see note 6, below). But the rise of a female literary authority was symptomatic. Journalism was an industry that offered outlets to female literary talent so conspicuous in the world of novel writing, much of which first appeared as contributions to the best journals. But women were not expected to become magazine illustrators, much less editors. Any kind of cartooning by women, who were largely excluded from the art world, was and remained extremely rare. But faux-female editor Judy is no feminist: her opening speech goes on to address the “Lords and Gentlemen, and Ladies too; Gentlemen of the Commons and Women of England, where she demands a suffrage, your votes as lawful due.” Vote for Judy, that is enough. But any kind of voting seems to echo the demand for electoral suffrage made in the pioneering book published the year of Judy’s founding, On the Subjection of Women (1867) by the eminent philosopher John Stuart Mill. This demand would not become law for a very long time, and was much ridiculed, including by Judy (i.e., editor Ross) “herself.” She—it must now be “she,” a female authority imposing herself of other women—explicitly rejects the very idea of women having “Rights” when all they needed was “Protection.” Uppity women were put rudely in their place in a cartoon of March 31, 1869: “The Rights of Women, or, take your choice

between ranting, ugly, females with a sign DOWN WITH MEN, or pretty mothers with pretty children on their laps.” This echoes Queen Victoria, frothing at this time over the “mad, wicked folly of Woman’s Rights, with all its attendant horrors.”2 So much for the follies of Marie Duval. Unsurprisingly, Judy showed no support for the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870, which aimed to give women rights over their personal property in marriage. She is however in favor of the Compulsory Education Act of the same year, which will massively increase literacy—and the potential readership of the magazine. This progressive educational reform would help bring the titular apotheosis of Ally, in Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, the magazine named after her character, priced at a penny, into the pocket of the “adult child” and “child-in-the adult” as well as children or adolescents everywhere. Like most comic journals, Judy saw herself as an educator, moral and political, under the rubric “Conservatism of the Truest and Bluest.”3 As such she opposed trades unionism, shown as Death leading the workers into the abyss of starvation (August 21, 1867)—yet it was the trade unions who fought for universal education, to bring more time and leisure for the masses to read. The unions’ struggle for recognition was however hard. Sullivan’s British Working Man associated unionism with bad workmanship. But the mass literacy enabled by the Compulsory Education Act and its successors would soon radically change the face of journalism. The children whose illiterate parents could not have read Judy grew up to become the readers of that magazine and soon, even more so, the cheap one-penny, then half-penny comic press. The comic strips run by the new rock-bottom cheap journals were aimed increasingly at children, with results lasting deep into the twentieth century. Marie Duval herself was in her art no feminist; her delight at the start (before and concurrently with Ally) was a particularly traditional feminine one. The new fashions amused her, with their pret-

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ty vagaries and their more aggressive, sexualizing, and controversial aspects expressed in the vogue for chignons and facial cosmetics, which dominate her single and small-group cartoons. “Gymnastics for Women” and “Alpinism for Ladies” were presented more as a fashion fad than as physical empowerment. Ally Sloper is not yet married; only much later, with other artists and in his own magazine, does he acquire wife and daughter, a whole family indeed. Women are not much present in Ally’s adventures according to Duval, in what is evidently a man’s world of petty and ruthless cunning and deception. Duval’s total contribution to Judy was massive and preponderant from the start. The newly founded online Marie Duval Archive has computed a total of 950 items (counting the multifigure comic strips as single drawings including 60 in 1869, 70 in 1870, thereafter about 100 per annum). My own count, made long ago, was that Marie did about 130 strips, most of them featuring Ally, excluding two album reprint compilations, by 1877. At this point, new Ally features fade away, while the old ones will be reprinted from 1884 in Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday.4 The provenance or authorship of Ally has been a subject of some dispute. The original concept of Ally is, by consensus, due to editor Charles Henry Ross (c. 1842–1897), who was certainly an inventive and versatile figure: former civil servant, author of six comic novels, many plays and children’s books, and in 1867 manager of three theaters. Ross was always something of a popular literary polymath, including plays in which his partner Duval acted. In 1867 he became cofounder of Judy. A few months after its founding, on August 14, 1867, Ross launched Ally Sloper (with Iky Mo), in “Some of the Mysteries of Loan and Discount,” evidently drawn by him (p. 388). Ally’s fraudulent moneymaking scheme starts with a two-penny charge just to fill out a form—the price of a copy of Judy. The magazine’s commitment to Ally proves hesitant for a while, but not the commitment to the format in which he will

appear: the comic strip which soon gathers momentum in adventures with other characters. Beginning on August 21, Judy ran a “Trip to Paris,” in three parts and twenty-five vignettes, initialed by “our own artist.” Ally is subjected to the familiar harassment at the frontier, this time for carrying outsize suspicious-looking art tools. These continue to embarrass him, attaining an impossible size (appropriate to his outlandish ambition?), leaving him sated with the pleasures of the Fair, as rubbish to be carted off in the morning.5 All this is interspersed with the return of Ally and sidekick Iky, defrauding à deux again, this time victimizing the theatrical public, and then engaging in a caper which gives Ally his name, sloping down the alley to avoid paying for his lodging (September 11). The fun flows in fast and farcical anecdotes: Iky invents a ruinous shaving machine with rotating blades; Ally’s matrimonial agency introduces him to his own wife, amid other disasters, week by week, caused by a telescope, incompetent tailoring, and attempts to learn boxing, that continue into Christmas and the New Year. The role of Duval in all this is not clear. This seasonal moment seems to prompt an editorial reappraisal: are all the Ally and other comic strips not as popular as expected? A long interval, well over a year, ensues without Ally or any comic strip, until May 26, 1869, Ally himself returning only months later (October 9), cheating at shilling dinners. By this time (according to the title page to Vol. 5) Charles Ross, probable primary author of Ally so far, has assumed full editorial control, and no doubt many other duties. Was it the impression caused by seeing his (new?) partner (and paramour?) Marie Duval’s recent narrative contributions to Will o’ the Wisp in June and July (see pp. 386–87) that prompted Ross to bring her drawings regularly and properly attributed into his paper? Her first signed comic strips there, titled At Boulong and Rural Felicity (both full pages, August 4, 1869), are very slightly narrative. Thereafter she is busy with “spots” sometimes expanded to three-part cartoons

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(or gag cartoons as the variant would be called), largely on the topic of fashion, all signed MD. On September 19, the Dead Season brings back Our Old Friend Ally Sloper, as does (in these friendly terms) At it Again, where Ally is a fake beggar in Another Heartless Swindle (in three scenes, September 29). The six scenes of “The Story of a Lady who Married a Walking Gent” is Duval’s first in Judy (signed, October 6) to qualify as real narrative: at the end the Lady discovers her beau wears padded stockings, which kills the dream. By the end of the year Marie and Ross are collaborating, initialing different drawings on the same thematic or semi-narrative page, with Duval numerically dominant. “En Route for Suez” (nine drawings, five signed MD, two CHR, December 1) is essentially political big cartoon material, here of course trivialized, vying for attention with the ever-lurking Irish problem. Ally is Judy’s “official correspondent” and Marie Duval is taking over. Ross’s contribution is thereafter limited to some occasional, childish, semi-narrative scribbles, with “Ally Sloper’s Goose Club” his last solo, December 5. Given her exclusive predominance for the next decade, in work initialed MD and later signed in full, Marie Duval, it is extraordinary that many literary sources have ascribed and continue to ascribe all of her (signed) work on Ally to partner Charles Ross.6 The early new year 1870 brought in a new and competent graphic artist with longer stories than the recurrent barely narrative three-scene squibs by Duval. I will call him/her from his/her signature Catface, and pass on. Having established Duval’s role in the early history of Ally, we likewise pass over, for lack of space, much of her work prior to the climax she reaches within our time frame, the FrancoPrussian War. Suffice it to mention meanwhile a strip probably by her which seems to comment on her elevation, a young female with no formal training, to principal artist on a popular magazine: History of a Genius, traces the rise of a boy artist from infantile scribbles to president of the Royal

Academy (January 5)—an ironic comment on the refusal of the R.A. to admit graphic artists. Duval is gaining in narrative coherence and slapstick effects, from squibs (or gags) to stories: Iky Mo Unlocks a Secret is a close-knit anecdote in which Ally as a private investigator ends up stuck head first in a chimney. In Ally Sloper, a Very Simple Story, by cheating at skittles the pair get thoroughly beaten up. Ally Sloper Works the Telegraph illustrates his casual slothfulness and the apotheosis of his umbrella, which along with his battered hat, will acquire a notoriety and personal identification of their own. Iky Mo Goes for a Capitalist pointedly asks, who is cheating whom? Big capitalism or petty fraud? All this and more, with its intimations of Sloper as detective-journalist, may be savored as we advance in that fateful year 1870 toward our climax. But first a pause to consider the wider implications of all this cheating. We suggested above that it reflects the naughty, secret wish-fulfillment of a lower-middle- (or upper-lower-) class audience, the get-rich-quick dreams of the poorly paid clerk or shop assistant. Cheating or grifting stands forth as a kind of profession, like con man or gangster today, a form of work, or when full-time, a career. As in the old picaresque tradition of fiction, Ally runs his arts of deception through a gamut of different social contexts, evoking a social panorama akin to Doyle’s Manners and Customs of the Englyshe of an earlier generation, now stripped of all innocence, gone rotten in the high capitalist age (a social potpourri in more than one sense), where cheating of the poor by the rich and famous is normal and acceptable. Think of the crooked financier Augustus Melmotte in Trollope’s The Way we Live Now (1875), who deliberately ruins his investors, big time. Supposedly from the battle-front, small-time Ally goes big news, cheating his way at the peril of his life among the combatants in a great war. Here he is not so endearing, but mad, if we believe him. The impending war threatened nightmare. Our glimpses into it, and otherwise the very fragmentary

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moments constituting Ally’s boasted exploits, oscillating between three drawings and nine, are at this time like flashes of dream-states half remembered, conjuring existential guilt for unknown misdemeanors. The flashbacks are to a childhood on behalf of readers not far removed from it. Duval has learned to draw Ally as a doodle on the office pad, somewhere between a child who knows no better and an adult who can’t be bothered.

Franco-Prussian War This war, which dragged on horribly, well into 1871, was early on taken by Duval and soon after by her fellow contributor to Judy, Percy Cruikshank, as fodder for comic relief in the usual way. The first and bloodiest chapter in the Franco-Prussian War has been called “The Disastrous Six Weeks”—close to the time period spent by Ally, on behalf of Judy, with his eight full-page text-and-pictorial reports from August 3 to September 28 (pp. 414–21). This series presents, in an absurdist way, a scattered but more persistent war coverage than any comparable journal cared to muster. Judy’s coverage plays upon the influence the press had won in this age of the telegraph and cheap newspapers, when the politicians of the various interested powers began to realize the necessity of taking public opinion into account and tried to shape it to their advantage. The best (or worst) example was Bismarck’s version of the Trump era’s “fake news” meme: his doctoring of the “Ems telegraph,” which precipitated the French declaration of war. The master tactician also had The Times, in supposedly neutral Britain, print the incendiary text of French proposals for a Franco-Prussian partition of Belgium. This brings to mind more recent history: major US wars justified by the worst, fraudulent manipulation of news—the alleged (i.e., invented) Tonkin Gulf incident, which was used to justify the US war in Vietnam, and the alleged (invented) possession by

Iraq of “weapons of mass destruction,” the pretext for invasion and occupation of that country, which caused millions of refugees and deaths. So far each of Ally’s frauds have progressed at a regular rhythm of one distinct episode per issue, all filling the back page, a privileged position now unmistakably commanded by Marie Duval. The threat of the accelerated armament of Europe, so eloquently rendered by Daumier over recent years, was not so conspicuous in Judy as it was in Punch. But war was in the air, and Catface’s single-drawing Battles of the World couched in exaggerated stylistic reprise of Doyle’s Barry-eux Tapestry designs, was intended, ominously, as a series from history (Waterloo, Hastings . . . ), only to be interrupted by war in the present. We reach a climax now of more or less connected military episodes following each other in quick succession. The prelude, conceived no doubt in ignorance of or disbelief in the impending conflict, which took everyone by surprise, features in the weeks preceding, when our (anti-) hero becomes footloose, Ally Sloper on his Travels, and Sloper at Le Havre. The Parting Forever of the pair of quasi-friends, Ally and Iky, bodes independence: Ally is on his own. On July 15 the French government declared war on Prussia, and sent in troops, falling into the trap set by Bismarck. Despite her worries that her choice is a dishonest and cowardly person, editor Judy (personified, we remember, as female and authoritative), has sent Ally, as artist and reporter all expenses paid, to Le Havre to accompany the French emperor to Prussia (July 20); but all the editor gets is a show of pretty bathing costumes. Nevertheless, within two weeks Sloper is seriously Off to the Wars (August 3), following an intervening big cut with the French and Germans at loggerheads, while John Bull plays the hopeful neutral intermediary. When war breaks out anyway, all John Bull (as Britain) can do, according to the big cut by William Boucher the following week, is send the navy to protect Belgium. Ally meanwhile, acting the proper publicist, makes it

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his job (in off-strip text) to design large-letter posters for placing outside the Judy shop, with Timeslike authority, announcing “from the Seat of War, fifteenth edition. TERRIFIC BATTLE BETWEEN THE FRENCH AND THE PRUSSIANS, awful losses of the French and capture of Ally Sloper’s Umbrella by the Prussians. See Judy. Only 2d.” This is followed next day by Ally’s contradictory report of a “tremendous engagement. Terrible losses by the Prussians, Recapture of Ally’s umbrella. Ceremony of restoration by H. M. Napoleon, Speech by A. Sloper on the occasion. See Judy only 2d,” and then “total extinction of both armies . . . ,” etc. There is something crazily sublime about bracketing mass killing and umbrella. It was, in fact, only the French army, decisively defeated at the battle of Sedan, and capitulating (September 1–2) within a month of the outbreak, that became effectively “extinct,” although the Prussian army did indeed suffer “terrible losses” (the total loss of life, more French than Prussian, is estimated at 160,000). Editor Judy is not amused by all these sanguinary exaggerations, and “disappointed” in Mr Sloper. In the drawings Ally sends home he forefronts his chivalry toward pretty ladies (wearing Duval’s typically exaggerated chignons), while executing his mission (Sloper off to the Wars, p. 414) by bravely perching, in quest of information, on chimney tops and perilous ruins, dodging bullets that Duval/Ally depicts actually decapitating him. Additional flourishes of him riding a camel in the desert and consulting the cannon in its very mouth confirm what Judy suspects: that Sloper is delirious, getting drunk before even setting off (if he ever did set off) and unable to tell truth from fantasy. The prominence of his bulbous, evidently red potato nose indicates a permanent state of intoxication. The flattering captions are his; the more realistic drawings by “our artist.” The stereotype of the reporter sitting at ease, or drinking in a comfortable hotel of (say) Baghdad or Kabul, in our own times, while the battle rages nearby, spinning unverified stories at second hand

to please his boss or advance his self-importance and his career, is very much with us. Does Judy parody this? Or only the inevitable distortions, rumors, half-truths, willful or careless fabrications, peddled wittingly, and perhaps wittily, by comic journals, as entertainment? Corrected, at best, by the serious big cut, Fun too gives the game away, in the “bloody battle” depicted in the August 20 issue, done in a childish style by William Brunton, “as the personal account of a correspondent who wasn’t there”—and for good reason: both sides had orders to shoot invasive news reporters. Fun imagined a reporter for the “Farthing Fibber” not daring to get even close to the theater of war. Note that Punch in the period under view (last half of 1870, twenty-six issues,) ran seventeen serious big cuts relating directly to the war, all like Judy sympathetic to France’s ordeal, and not a single joke at its expense. Even super-patriotic Cham, from Paris besieged, could not resist the grim joke (full page) about starving people hunting for rats in the gutter (the government actually issued rat meat, considered standard famine fare).7 Fantasy and absurdity (comic strip) alternate with the serious and factual (big cut, by “WB-J?” = Fun artist William Brunton?), in a kind of contrapuntal rhythm. Art and fiction mesh with history, tragedy with comedy. By August 17 Emperor Napoleon III is threatened by revolution in Paris (big cut). Ally to the Front (p. 415) that week has our hero, an equal opportunist, “making it all right” with both sides, bravely charging through gun smoke, hat and umbrella aloft, then at the bitter battles of “Friedswiller” (surely Froeschwiller, or Wörth, August 7) and Saarbruck (August 2) in ignominious flight, returning to deal (i.e., swindle) in supplies with both sides, keeping the liquor for himself. In the cartoon for August 24, England with Russia and Austria intervene (in reality fruitlessly) as the voices of peace, while Sloper a Prisoner in that issue (p. 416) bribes his way out of Prussian durance vile with sausages, leaving behind crumpled hat and umbrella

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Fig. 14-1. william Boucher, “Modern warfare,” Judy, September 7, 1870 (from Scully).

Fig. 14-2. william Boucher, “the eagle’s triumph,” Judy, September 14, 1870 (from Scully).

as relics of his glory. The next big cartoon shows “Civilisation’s Lament” at the generalized killing and destruction: “Civilisation’s march is stay’d, its glorious past forgotten and the future betrayed.” Sloper’s Retreat (August 31) is written on the eve of battle from inside Metz, Napoleon’s headquarters, besieged since August 26 but holding out until October 29, when 170,000 French prisoners fell to the Germans (p. 417). This was long after the decisive capitulation at Sedan September 1–2. Duval’s wordier strip reflects the need to vindicate Ally’s honor against any supposition that he “like some other special correspondents [is] all this time to be found bottled up [sic!] in an off court [tavern] out of Fleet Street.” He, and a new artist and rustic friend, together with a peasant family, are spectators, supposedly out of harm’s way but obliged to flee in haste, all to end up in a messy scrum. The trophies of umbrella and hat fall separately to the opposing

armies. All, objects and people, collapse as it were in ruin, in (unintended) parallel with next week’s cartoon called Modern Warfare (Fig. 14-1), that is the savage destruction of Parisian churches and art by simian Prussians holding burning grenade-bombs (this, in reality, a great exaggeration). Duval’s After the Battle (p. 418) in the same issue (September 7), after some predictable evasion of danger, contains an “Episode of the Boots,” in the time-honored fate of dead and dying on the battlefield, where Ally robs a recumbent drummer boy. The lad springs back to life and in a “violent,” “dastardly,” and “unprovoked” manner recovers his boots. The big Boucher cartoon “The Eagle’s Triumph” (Fig. 14-2) registers the birth of the Republic (September 4), after the fall of Napoleon, as workers and Paris fight off the attacking double-headed eagle ridden by Bismarck. (In reality, the new Republic of Paris had to contend with the disgraced French

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army, which effectively began to collaborate with the enemy in crushing first the Republic, and then the Commune.) After a two-week gap, Duval is joined by George Cruikshank’s great-nephew, a fairly frequent contributor who had been signing George Cruikshank Jnr. His repeated use of the celebrated name was much resented by the family elder, and he signed his own caricatural version of the war, perhaps in rivalry with Duval and Judy, with the distinctive name of Percy Cruikshank (pp. 425–32). His version of the war, coming up shortly, mixes a certain descriptive realism with peculiar anatomical exaggerations (in the Judy page, excessively spindly legs) and strange obscurities of meaning. In Judy, George Cruikshank Jnr (i.e., Percy) puts the accent on the comic humiliation of the vanquished French following an armistice imposed by the Prussian general (demanding the major French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine), who signs with a huge feather while his French counterpart, having already signed (?), squirms upside down—in agony? “How it began”—the question on everyone’s lips—placed under the opening, title-scene has Napoleon III thrusting a stick labeled Spanish liquorice at the Prussian (Bismarck—but his copious mustache did not in reality curl upward at the ends), in reference to the Spanish marriage to a Hohenzollern (Prussian) prince, opposed by the French. The mountains behind must be the Pyrenees. The liquorice stick, like a sword blade, impales the title letters “The War on the Rhind” corrected to “Rhine” in tiny letters following. This clumsy quasi-pun is explained (more or less) in the fourth picture showing what I take to be a slab of liquorice (a condiment often known as Spanish liquorice), the “rhind” of which is infested by “mitey” armies. The final, non sequitur picture is captioned “destruction of a bridge by the Prussians,” performed, oddly, by insectoid soldiers pinioning with the butt-end of their bayonetted rifles a pair of French generals, who must be portraits, one of them bald.8

Judy as editor declines the offer of more from this obviously confused source (Percy Cruikshank), having restored Ally (and Duval) to the back page of the same issue, with Sloper and Moses Reunited (p. 420). Wearing a spiked Prussian helmet after the decisive Prussian victory at Sedan, Sloper is discovered to have stolen a French uniform, and is sentenced by the French to be shot or else join them. He chooses the latter, cheered on by children. Hiding behind the trunk of a tree, which seems to quiver with his own terror, he finds it also occupied by Iky Moses. A trio of pretty women admire (?) portraits of the abject cowards under the title. At this point the big cut also went AWOL, changing the subject from war to Papal Infallibility, before returning to the fray in a cartoon called Birds of Prey where (Republican) Paris seizes a pistol from the belt of dying France, in order to resist the murderous plundering Prussia, which had demanded the cession in permanence of Alsace and Lorraine. Judy’s verse next door warns that the British response, to train the Volunteers against invasion, was useless and irresponsible. When Sloper and Mo Go into the Spy Business (p. 421) the next week, the two captives combine to sell plans to break into Paris (now heavily under siege) by a secret passage, which astounds various Prussian officers, earning the conspirators (once again) a sentence of instant execution. We end our reproduction on the fate they richly deserve (after all, Judy is staunchly pro-French), which leaves proprietress Judy convinced that Ally is indeed no more, having received “his last thoughts,” the submission of a bill for £99. 1s. 3d. By nature dishonest, deceitful, a grifter and double agent ready to betray both sides at once, Ally was made for the business, as if reporting and spying were one, which was widely feared. Spying was everywhere, or paranoia feared it to be. Already in the prewar, pro-war hysteria of Paris, alleged Prussian “spies” were everywhere seized and roughed up. The many Englishmen in Paris remaining as observers

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fed the mounting obsession. Any foreign accent made you suspect. Even French generals were arrested in error. One English doctor claimed he had been arrested no less than forty-two times.9 It is therefore not so surprising to find France’s premier and ubiquitous caricaturist, Cham, arrested while trying to help on a battery emplacement because he spoke with a slightly foreign accent. A futile political gesture ends Judy’s war reportage: the magazine reiterates the vain hope that Britain, in concert with Russia, will come to the aid of France, beset by intolerable armistice terms (About Time cartoon, October 5). In fact, Britain, opposed to the French invasion from the start, became willing to intervene diplomatically, if only to forestall Russia anxious to seize some advantage in the Near East by revoking the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Crimean war. In obedience to the rule by which the heroes of serials cannot be allowed to die, Judy, having discovered the falsity of Iky Mo’s report of Ally’s death, but happy to be rid of the pair forever, learns they are going to start a rival, opposition newspaper. While the Judy big cut is diverted from the war into a royal marriage, Sloper fulfills his promise, or threat, to Go into Comic Literature (October 26), which decides Judy even more irrevocably to have no more to do with him. She leaves to George Cruikshank Jnr (i.e., Percy) the Truth about the Interview after Sedan, which is about the conflicting press reports of that momentous business. Duval and Sloper have left the war by November, in exhaustion one might say, when Judy diverts to a very different topic, A Tale of a Tooth (p. 422). Might readers have brought to this painful bit of farce a parallel with the ongoing national tragedy: in both, a mistaken sacrificial bravado invites a counterproductive disaster? And is the dentist actually Bismarck, represented in French caricature as extracting the teeth of neighboring powers? Or had Duval simply lost a tooth of her own at this moment?

Panorama of the Franco-Prussian War, by Percy Cruikshank With Ally dominant in Judy, George Percy Cruikshank (to use his full name) adopted an entirely different format independent of editorial control: the same his grand-uncle had found for The Toothache twenty-one years before, that is a “roller picture” or concertina album in thirty-eight drawings, called Panorama of the Franco-Prussian War (pp. 425–32). The historical interpretation (hardly worthy of the term) is now quite different from Duval’s. As in his Judy page, Percy Cruikshank starts with exchange of diplomatic notes which allowed Bismarck to maneuver and provoke the French into starting the war, which they do, bottle in hand, with “drunken” enthusiasm, military and civilian alike, in expectation of a quick march to Berlin, where a great (cannon) ball awaits/invites them. The cannonade of heavy punning runs amok. Field Marshal von Moltke will orchestrate (pp. 426 and 427). Marshal McMahon for the French is appointed head of the army and chief strategist. On July 28 the emperor brought his fourteen-year-old son the Prince Imperial to the field of battle, the siege of Metz, to observe from a safe distance, though here shown assailed in a “hellish fire.” (In exile, and grown into a brave soldier with the British army, he would die in the Anglo-Zulu war in 1879.) The major defeat at “Woerth” (Froeschwiller) is inflicted by “black-guards” representing the Zouaves, pictured here and further on in a perfectly racist manner as very black, very savage, with shaven heads, huge rings hanging from nostril and ears, wearing the baggy trousers (serouci) which marked their uniforms since the foundation of the regiment out of Algeria in 1842. From the start the Zouaves were an ethnic mix of Berber, Arab, European, and sub-Saharan black, officered by the French. Soon more European than any other race, they got much media attention, praised for their conduct in the Crimean war and as part of the imperial guard

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in 1870, where they constituted four regiments at Froeschwiller. Here their honorific task is merely to convey physically the ailing emperor to Sedan (hence the sedan chair), where he capitulated with 104,000 troops; and the empire imploded. His abject surrender to “dear brother” King of Prussia is symbolized by the surrender of his broken sword and taming of his bedraggled eagle (this creature symbolic of his crazy Napoleonic militarist ambition was much mocked in the satirical comic strip biographies we have seen). The emperor is suddenly grown old—as he appeared in reality, sick and in atrocious pain all the while, though his detention in Prussia was much more outwardly comfortable than is suggested by the huge, heavy chains. France (actually Paris) rises up against the defeated leader and declares a Republic (September 4). The destruction of the imperial icons by low-class elements (peasants in rural clogs and smocks), and the contemptuous playing bowls with the (sculptured) Napoleonic head by semi-militarized working classes sporting the revolutionary bonnet and cocarde, anticipates the historic toppling of the Vendôme column to come later, under the Commune. A concerted popular defiance of the departed regime resulted in a terrible siege, while continuous resistance “à outrance” led by Gambetta in the provinces, threatening death to any recalcitrant French (rhetorically, but see miniature guillotine on table), tries to rouse the provinces, here represented by “red” Lyons repudiating the defeated forces as “an army of lions led by asses.” This was an old Arabian proverbial phrase applied by Marx to the British in the Crimea and now by the Germans to the French, thence to popular culture (and World War One). Strasbourg, which surrendered amid great destruction on September 27, had indeed suffered hunger during the siege, resorting to a diet of the “famous but indigestible pâté de foie gras.”10 Inevitably, Percy Cruikshank’s spoof lacks context, which we provide minimally here. De facto

prime minister Adolphe Thiers had been negotiating tirelessly and laboriously with Bismarck, while Victor Hugo, returned from exile, from his seat in the French assembly (interim government) delivered “touching appeals” regarded by contemporaries as “unexampled silliness”11 and certainly quite ineffective. His protecting a couple of infants that could be his own little grandchildren could also refer to his denunciation of the Prussians for killing children. The flamboyantly brave General AugusteAlexandre Ducrot, in command of what was left of the army after the defeat at Sedan, had refused to accept surrender or his imprisonment on parole, and escaped (presumably, from the confused rendering of him on horseback, in disguise as a peasant) to lead the French in more, and costly defeats. Another general, Louis-Jules Trochu, failed in his breakout from the siege, after massive increase of the “forti-ifications” (of the Panorama caption, reference surely to forty forts he added), which required the felling of forests of trees in the city’s parks and recreation areas, as shown. These would furnish construction in defense of the thirty-eight perimeter miles surrounding Paris, as well as provide fuel for the desperate inhabitants. The Prussians had, naturally, prevented real food from entering the city, now reduced to unspeakable foodstuffs. The objects shown in the wheelbarrow (Pl. 14-3, pp. 426 and 430) may be intended as scraps of meat scavenged from the zoo animals, which would have included assorted large wild beasts shown in the next scene but one. But they, very much alive, may be hoping to still their own hunger from the corpses of fallen aeronauts whose balloon has collapsed. They look up in expectation—of turning the tables?12 The balloon became a well-publicized feature of life, agency, and symbol of resistance and attempts to break the information blockade. Indistinguishable figures in the foreground cheer the balloonists (?) as they defy the Prussian cannonballs aimed at the balloons (made of makeshift varnished cotton sub-

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stituting for unavailable silk). The balloons could with luck bring a few people out, most famously Gambetta on October 7, but none back in. The balloon here is marked Post Office: it was estimated that from September 15 thousands, by October 3, 150,000 letters left the city. Metz held out until October 27–29. There was starvation there too, which is why two wafer-thin residents (Pl. 14-3, pp. 427 and 431) look hungrily at well-fed war-minister Marshal (Edward) Leboeuf—a good likeness of this relatively obscure figure, chosen here for his gastronomic name (= from ox or bullock beef). He was taken prisoner at the surrender of Metz with his commander Bazaine. In occupied France, the two figures hanged from a tree at night appear to be military (from their baggy trousers, Zouaves) (last segment of Pl. 14-3, p. 432, far left). The caption’s “proceedings” and “execution” and the secret locale suggest extra-judicial military reprisals by the Prussians, which certainly took place, and any such would be well publicized and exaggerated at the time, especially by French and the (by now) Franco-sympathetic British sources. But a standard history speaks of the besiegers being “well-behaved and [that] relations with the inhabitants could have been worse”; stories or evidence of outright atrocities are mainly about those committed by the regular army stationed in Versailles. This is later history: the army’s savage punishment of or vengeance against Communards, under the command of the “ferocious” Marquis de Gallifet, who boasted, “I am even crueler than you can imagine . . . ,” was of the worst.13 We see the Prussian king reporting victory to his queen and future empress Augusta, in a vein, one can imagine, that in reality took account of her opposition to Bismarck’s war, and her commiseration with the stubborn resistance in Paris. This is coded in the “incessant crowing” of the Gallic cock so disturbing to the victor’s sleep. That resistance is also coded in the second bird the Prussian has to reach, over a very high fence representing the fortifications of Paris, against the menace of angry French revolutionary

riff-raff. If the French republican peasant thinks he is still the “proprietor” of his own city, he is thoroughly bloodied by the knife of Bismarck at his neck, which “lays him out” in sick bed. So have the Prussians won? This outcome, already certain long before the end of the year, is denied by the final image of the Prussian (Pl. 14-3, p. 432). It comes as a surprise and a challenge to interpretation: a confusing portrait of a Bismarck (?), also “laid up in sickness,” is represented in two fused heads, the one in front heavily mustachioed overlapping the other which is badly scarred, the figure of the latter standing in a warm foot bath, taking and/or administering gruel and medicines. The simplest conclusion to be drawn from this distorted conclusion to the Panorama is that no end to the war is in sight, only extreme, continued suffering on both sides. Any interpretation raises the question of what month Percy Cruikshank’s album was published. The idea of victor and vanquished both sickened and badly injured by the war was not strange by early 1871, the year-date on the album, given the immense loss of life and continued fighting on both sides. The sickness in Paris was paramount, as the British knew from compatriots who had stayed in the city during the long siege. The Brits helped much with food supplies, the provision of ambulances and the generosity of individuals such as Richard Wallace, who donated millions of francs and received a baronetcy and a Légion d’Honneur for his services during the siege. The British were also gifted with an incomparable collection of paintings, for which Wallace began preparations for transfer to London.14 The British public had veered toward outright sympathy for suffering France, the famine in Paris exacerbated by the brutal Prussian bombardment. Triumphant as the Germans were (a triumph which took on sadistic form in a “comic” strip by Wilhelm Busch, Monsieur Jacques à Paris), the German public was questioning the human cost on their own side. Peace or armistice negotiations had bogged down, dragging on and on.

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Percy Cruikshank’s album could have appeared in early January 1871, necessarily well before the Commune was installed in April, and probably before Paris surrendered to the Prussians January 28, and the popular declaration of a “mystical Commune.” This boded real revolution from below, and terrified the bourgeoisie inside and outside Paris, who adopted the slogan “rather Bismarck than

[the ever-jailed] socialist Blanqui.” This bizarre “panorama” of the war compiled no doubt in haste and somewhat at random, could not foresee the imminent Commune or its slaughter doing Bismarck’s work for him in the months ahead. But the relevance of the album, suspended as it was in mid-war, must have continued to be troublesome, as long as the war lasted, and beyond.

The English Clown at the French Funeral germany, in wilhelm Busch, exercised a certain dominance over european comic strip art over the last third of the century, a cultural dominance reflecting a new political agency. the incidence of uncredited (photographic) copies of Busch in the american, British, and various european journals after 1871 is huge. Before that, allusions to germany in european comic strip art are few. germany is a pleasant tourist destination, as we see in doré’s Voyage en Allemagne (sur le Rhin) (1851); in microstate form, it resents the insult to its police force in doyle’s Foreign Tour (p. 140–51); absurd aspects of student life show up in the otherwise renowned german university (du Maurier’s Student Duel, p. 334 duval’s Grand Duke, p. 386). in du Maurier drawing-room cartoons, germans are invariably much fêted musicians, speaking abominably accented english. not only was their music good, but so was their art: even if it turned to cruel, polemical purpose, to mock the pain of the Parisians under siege (Fig. 14-3). as early as September 1870, william Boucher’s big cuts in Judy had no time for humor, no time for duval’s ambivalence. Prussia is punitive and savage, unwilling to make peace as a maniacal simian furiously brandishing weaponry, trampling europe and wreaking material havoc; and a week later, as a double-headed imperial eagle dripping blood over the cradle of the nascent republic guarded by helpless workers (Figs. 14-1 and 14-2). tenniel for Punch, by contrast, lent Prussia ominous dignity as the “new caesar” triumphing over the helplessly defiant gaul, and as a mythic wagnerian conqueror riding over the corpse of France (december 17, 1870, and March 11, 1871).15 ally Sloper’s frivolous intervention, interleaved with the righteous fury of Boucher in Judy, is, to say the least, shocking. has ally become already so indispensable a fixture in the journal that he was able (with a push from editor ross?) to barge in so importunately—like a clown at a funeral? even the terrible nature of the war (more terrible than any since napoleon i, closer to Britain than the crimean war) cannot stop him, authorized as a reporter acting explicitly at editorial behest. it is as if the passions aroused by the war needed deflating, and ally remains in character: irresponsible, cowardly, possibly sunk in drunken hallucination—hardly just shell-shocked. Judy pretends to regret appointing him and suffering his fecklessness.

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Fig. 14-3. wilhelm Busch, “Beginning of the encirclement.” “excuse me my friend, but this is war.” (From comic strip, Monsieur Jacques à Paris, during the siege of the year 1870, composed and published december 1870.)

More research might establish the attitudes of the popular press beyond Punch and Judy. if ally’s adventures are (given his character) predictably farcical, the no less farcical but chronologically better-grounded narrative of Percy cruikshank’s Panorama (waiting as it were in the wings) takes a unique turn, like ally’s, at a moment when the outcome of the war (apart from obvious Prussian victory) seemed in abeyance. cruikshank junior uses the “concertina” format favored for the children’s market, which is certainly not now his target readership. he plays upon Prussian ruthlessness in battle and siege, but ends on a moment of the endlessly halting and prolonged negotiations for peace when it seemed possible to conclude that the suffering inflicted was equally damaging to both sides. Percy’s little album is in a way selective “highlights of the war” as experienced by the French, a comedic Reader’s Digest version; while Judy, arguably, willy-nilly targets a not-uncommon journalistic attitude: the sloppy tactic of casual, derivative, and uninformed reporting. despite calls for British intervention voiced by Judy among others, there is little suggestion that the Prussian victory represented much of a threat to Britain, much less one capable of arousing the traditional fear of invasion. Yet this was imagined, in a sensational tale with sensational sales (110,000 copies by august 1871) called The Battle of Dorking, in which the volunteers such as those mobilized by charles keene in Punch at this time, were easily defeated and pillaged by Prussian invaders.16 in reality the english were happily flocking as tourists to postwar germany in ever greater numbers and—who knows?—picking up a copy of Max und Moritz, where juvenile violence is given free rein.17

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Back to the Future: Duval Continues Neither Percy Cruikshank nor Marie Duval were about to let partisanship in the Franco-Prussian War get in the way of their comic frolics. At the end of the year 1870, Ally Sloper, livelier than ever after his (mis)adventures at the front and his rumored death, shared the comic strip format in Judy with George Cruikshank Jnr (as he still called himself). It deals, among other topics, with the Terrible Anarchy in Islington, in which Iky Mo fails to be voted in for that “ferocious” (working-class) borough; it twists “Ye Horrible Tail of one Unfortynate Catte,” a feline scratching white out of black-coated scraperboard; and confronts “The Growly-Wowly of the Trackless Waste,” in which an exotic monster devours the hunter. This is an avatar of the “savage Africa” strip. Ally Sloper, still dominant in Judy after being sent off to found a newspaper of his own, seems to have had a premonition of a “rival” paper later using his name, and character, in a very different form: Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (1884–1923). This clearly relied on an old familiarity. Such was the popularity of Ally that as early as 1872 and 1873, compilations of his earlier trickeries from Judy were published in Ross’s A Book of Comicalities and Some Playful Episodes in the Career of Ally Sloper, which may claim to be one of England’s first comic books. Ally was described as having “caused one half of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom to suffer from a severe attack of Sloper-on-the brain.”18 Over time Ally rises, Macaire-like, in the social scale. In his later, post-Duval, post-1884 incarnation his swindles grow grander, operating in higher social contexts. Although Ally may occasionally go to jail, he has become a popular celebrity, boosted by all-too-familiar merchandizing spin-offs and circulation hype. He dresses better and is drawn (by other, professionally trained male artists) according to his higher status. He is wholly dominant, the magazine is his, he is the new journalism, the narcissistic self-publicist and self-satirist of pop- and tabloid-style newspaper still

Fig. 14-4. Marie duval, “a tragedy in Fleet Street,” Judy, June 21, 1876.

so much with us today. He is eventually believed to be a real person. This all lies in the future, grown from the seed planted by Duval, whose Ally strips are reprinted in the new Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday magazine. We leave Duval in Sloper in Savage Africa (Pl. 14-3, p. 423), a racist mockery of imperialism, where attempts to convert the heathen and find the source of the Nile and David Livingstone carries a painful cost, such as the loss of one’s ears. Imperialism also brings one into contact with the primitive, Picasso’s use of which is hailed as the (or a) beginning of modern (or Cubist) art. A generation before Picasso, Duval and Ally Sloper were attracted to “the primitive” in Africa, along with nonsense and the uses of childish and even abstract scribbles. Together with graphic tricks she found in Wilhelm Busch (known in an English edition since 1868), whose precocious

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Fig. 14-5 a & b. Marie duval, “ghostesses,” Judy, January 1, 1873. “ally Sloper kicked out,” Judy, September 12, 1877.

bodily vibrations, oscillations, and radical linear abbreviations she liked to “quote,” Duval should be honored as a proto-modernist, pushing the frontier of art toward the innovations of fin-de-siècle and twentieth century. Is it a coincidence, or irrelevant, that Ally Sloper, the crudely drawn social primitive, was popularized by a woman, the gender proletarianized and primitivized (not to say infantilized) by law, and custom, and excluded from power and the workplace? Is it her revenge to subject a male to such Buschian graphic bodily distortions (Figs. 14-4 and 14-5)?

Nonsense and Nonsensibility For a long time to come, the comic strip as a genre labored under the stigma of being little better than childish nonsense. One could argue this prejudice started with Töpffer, whose disingenuously disparaged “little follies” caught on instantly with (older) children and adults alike. Some of the comic strips dating from the end of the 1860s, as we have seen,

verge on nonsense. Duval’s pseudonymous album Queens and Kings and Other Things of 1874 and Du Maurier’s French verses in Punch about the same time must be ranked as pure nonsense. This literary art form is very English, and designed in the first place to appeal unequivocally to children, in a way the French did not attempt, although Cham comes close in his very early comic strip fairy-tale parodies of the early 1840s. It is generally acknowledged that Englishlanguage pure nonsense began with Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense in 1846, a best seller with sequels in the 1860s. His “logical nonsense” was given a sophisticated, philosophical turn by Lewis Carroll in 1865 and 1871. Lear’s nonsense was declared by the author “pure and absolute,” and hailed by a critic in 1894 as “bringing out a new and deeper harmony of life in and through its contradiction . . . a true work of the imagination, a child of genius, and its writing one of the fine arts.”19 The comic strip is another latecomer now admitted to “the fine arts,” and nonsense in its children’s department a universal pleasure.

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Pl. 14-1-1 to Pl. 14-1-8. comic strips on this page and the seven following were all published in Judy, 1870. all are by Marie duval, except # 5, which is by george cruikshank Jnr (Percy g. cruikshank). 1. “Sloper off to the wars” (aug. 3). 2. “ally to the Front” (aug. 17). 3. “Sloper a Prisoner” (aug. 24). 4. “Slopers retreat” (aug. 31). 5. “after the Battle” (Sep. 5). 6. “the war on the rhind rhine” (Sep. 21). “Sloper and Moses reunited” (Sep. 21). 7. “Sloper and Mo go into the Spy Business” (Sep. 28). 4 1 4     a n e n d i n g a n d a B e g i n n i n g : M a r i e d u va l & P e r c Y c r u i k S h a n k

Pl. 14-1-2. Marie duval, Judy, Part 2.

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Pl. 14-1-3. Marie duval, Judy, Part 3.

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Pl. 14-1-4. Marie duval, Judy, Part 4.

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Pl. 14-1-5. Marie duval, Judy, Part 5.

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Pl. 14-1-6. Percy cruikshank, Marie duval, Judy, Part 6.

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Pl. 14-1-7. Marie duval, Judy, Part 7.

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Pl. 14-1-8. Marie duval, Judy, Part 8.

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Pl. 14-2. Marie duval, “a tale of a tooth,” Judy, november 16, 1870.

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Pl. 14-4. Marie duval, “Sloper in Savage africa,” Judy, august 28, 1872.

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Pl. 14-3. Percy cruikshank, Panorama of the Franco-Prussian War, painted by PC from the Sketches of Messrs Smith, Brown and Robinson. london (1870/1871). thirty-three drawings arranged in an album continuously on a pullout (“roller”) sheet. on pages 426 and 427, you will find the entire roller picture, laid out in three horizontal columns or segments. these should be read horizontally left to right across the two facing pages. on pages 428 to 432 are larger details of the same images. the two horizontal columns on pages 428–31 should also be read left to right across the facing pages. the final detailed segment of the roller picture is on page 432.   425

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Epilogue

REBIRTH OF A CHANGELING

A

ll this was not for Punch. Given the dominance of Punch in evidence here, we may ask why from the 1870s the magazine so quickly abandoned the new genre it had embraced. The two surviving Punch stalwarts who had favored graphic narrative, Charles Keene and George Du Maurier, lost interest: the latter with just two exceptions. After a twenty-two-year gap, Du Maurier returned to old haunts on two occasions, probably by editorial behest in order to fill space in Punch’s seasonal Almanacks of 1892 and 1894. At this time the artist was turning to novel writing, and Punch’s reputation had declined, having become tired and repetitive. Du Maurier’s return was to old haunts, literally: Tom Noddy’s Christmas Nightmare, occupying four pages, is occasioned by the wrong food, which revives old obsessions, shriveling further the already minute poor Noddy (reviving the name from Leech), who is further humiliated (in his nightshirt) before the object of his desire, the society giantess Princess Fredegonde zu Donnerhausen von Blitzenstein. The Lost Chord, also in four pages, is another nightmare, about a musician immobilized by stage fright. Otherwise Punch persisted through to the end of the century and beyond, in the endless, dreary perambulation of academically drawn illustrated jokes, with captions featuring the witty and the witless, the fatuous infelicity and the verbal faux pas, while limiting the welcome graphic innovation of newcomers Harry Furniss, Linley Sambourne, and Bernard Partridge to single cartoons, and James A. Shepherd to some quirky animal altercations. Punch returns to its role of pioneer of the comic strip only with the incomparable H. M. Bateman in 1916, whose pinpoint, wordless tracking of the changing moment and movement have become classics.

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The reason for Punch’s neglect (call it a conscious disdain?) for the new genre it had once made its own, must be sought in its perception of the awful fate into which it had fallen starting around 1870: vulgarization and outright degeneration in cheaper papers—hardly rivals—the two-penny, one-penny, and finally halfpenny humorous illustrated weeklies strewn over the last decades of the century. The appeal here was to classes much below the Punch readership, including children and semiliterates, which achieved a startling, shocking commercial success, in a new age of journalistic trivialization, scandal-mongering, and muck-raking still with us. This whole era has fascinated scholars, and its manifestation as essential comic strip history is treated in full elsewhere.1 As a coda to Punch’s relative dignity we descend to the lowest farce. The transition is remarkable: this look into an immediate future emphasizes features that help explain Punch needing to distance itself. The vulgarization may be said to have started with Will o’ the Wisp, which as we show had become even before 1870 a specialist in the comic strip, but one of a farcical and nonsensical kind, reminiscent of music hall and pantomime. The lower-class appeal of petty fraudster Ally Sloper—a social but not an aesthetic degenerate in Judy from the 1870s—was respectfully validated by none other than Linley Sambourne, with Tenniel Punch’s principal political cartoonist, who noted that Ally, “originally created by Miss Marie Duval, [was] a genuinely comic character, which is exactly to the taste of a vast class to whom Mr Punch does not appeal.”2 Ally became a popular phenomenon well before he was elevated with much biographical enrichment from comic strip to elegant front-page splashes in a magazine named after him, from 1884. The elevation was social and graphic, but internal: the lower-class readership remained much the same base as Judy’s version, but reaching, one assumed, a bit higher. As a popular recurring character, Sloper was followed in Judy by James Brown’s McNab of that Ilk, and in Fun

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by James Sullivan’s British Working Man. Punch had no time, any more than for Ally, for lower-class types such as the foul-tongued homicidal drunkard Scot McNab (who brazenly advertised Scotch whisky) or the defiant working-class incompetents chronicled by Sullivan. Following Sullivan, other unsavory characters familiar to a lower-class audience, more bungling and swindling craftsmen, tradesmen, and shopkeepers, established the popularity of the first successful penny paper: Moonshine (1879–1902). The lower-class appeal of another one-penny weekly, Pick-Me-Up (1888–1909), whose very title identified itself as a hangover remedy, was among other cheap magazines the most shameless exploiter of the new expedient of cheapening: plagiary. This helped boost its circulation to 250,000 by 1890, well beyond that of Punch, a figure abetted by various circulation hypes in which the comic strips joined, and regular advertising by a new kind of fraudster: abortionists. The pioneer plagiarist was Funny Folks from 1874, which like its competitors filched material from Germany (especially Wilhelm Busch), France, and the United States. These countries were also undergoing a mode for cheap humorous magazines and offered much low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking, facilitated by the photomechanical processes which obviated the need for copying and engraving by hand. Broadsheet pages and even whole albums of Busch passed, uncredited, as alluring ever-ready morsels into the ever-ready baskets of the new cheap British weekly. Resident, badly paid native artists complained at the influx of free foreign competition. Some magazines claimed, not too credibly, that they employed no “sweated labor.” Although the small scale of comic strip stories encouraged amateurs with little graphic skill to submit work, theirs or borrowed, demand outstripped supply, as one can judge from the way a single panel joke was artificially extended to fill empty space. Titles such as Scraps and Illustrated Bits warned in advance not to expect anything more substantial than jokes, single or extended, nothing that

could be classed as news, or even original, while the latter paper even institutionalized a feature called Illustrated Bits of Foreign Fun. The title Scraps, also dependent on German imports, blithely assumed the contemptuous, mocking generic term from “scrapbook journalism.” Apart from all the plagiary, publishers found other ways to cut costs to the bone, with the cheapest paper and casual, careless layout. One light shines forth from the dim story of fin-de-siècle comics: the extraordinarily enduring characters, descendants in their way of Ally Sloper, called Weary Willie and Tired Tim, tramps created by Tom Browne and featured in Illustrated Chips, 1896–1953, and into my own childhood. The low quality of the paper is a threat to the physical survival of some magazines of this peri-

od: in consulting Comic Cuts of this period (at a halfpenny, another survivor 1890–1953), I found the danger not so much the bleeding through of the ink onto the reverse side (as shown on p. 369), not so much the occasional indecipherability, but the acidic disintegration of whole pages, as I turned them into a shower of confetti. Alfred Harmsworth, owner of Comic Cuts, was enriched by such publications to become Lord Northcliffe. It would take generations before the comic strip and comic books could rise from the reputational miasma of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Miasma? No—another rebirth looking at glories undreamed.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The usual list of debts is here limited. Roger Sabin and Simon Grennan, whose second book on Marie Duval is just out, kindly read chapter 14. Professor Robert Tombs identified the French generals in the FrancoPrussian war. Richard Scully honored a draft in a most generous external review. Any solicitation for advice or critique, and any necessary retouching was hindered by the dread pandemic. (As well, any errors remaining in this book are due to the author’s inability to access the necessary libraries closed due to the pandemic.) Saying which invites a complaint (into the ether) about my computer, the constant malfunctions of which, as if in cunning exploitation of a long-standing innocence and ignorance, have accelerated pandemically, and in the absence of proximate help from my (alas, now physically distant) copy editor and assistant Becca Wilson. Dear Becca. Regarding both technical and editorial challenges she has proved perspicacious and infinitely patient, and attentive to glitches and imperfections only dimly visible to my mortal eyes and mental apprehension. This, my last book, gives me my last chance to thank her for what has seemed a lifetime of devotion to the cause. I read by chance of an expectation that the corona virus “offers an opportunity for a great emancipation.” An emancipation from technology run amok, from a “rage against the machine?” Despite all hindrances, let me record some words of thanks to the University Press of Mississippi, producers of this book, working now in the most difficult circumstances: Director Craig Gill and his essential staff, Katie Keene, Shane Gong Stewart, Debbie Upton (freelance copyeditor), Mary Heath, and Pete Halverson, for his excellent design. Finally, that miracle of love and patience, my wife Marjoyrie, writer and artist à sa manière, yogi, and gardener, whose cooking is god’s gift to the gastric juices, and who has brought me by her constant and various salutary ministrations this far; she also bequeathed to me, long ago, two remarkable children, Dan and Amy, now successful professionals, and a great, long-standing enrichment of my life.

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Postscript (to dedication): Sitting each evening at one of your impeccable dinners, Marjoyrie, I fill a moment of waiting by looking up at the Punch volumes, fifty years complete in twenty-six volumes 1841–1891, arrayed neatly on a specially built shelf between two windows, dressed in their gold-embossed, red cloth garb, exactly as printed and sold long ago; only repaired down to the last volume and saved from disintegration when I moved to the dry climate of California. Let me add, for the favored few who find amusement in reading this far into the end of this book, to the words of my dedication at the beginning, the genesis of how I discovered at age seven, just returned from evacuation during the war, the Punch set and the huge Hogarth volume that determined my career as a historian of popular art. These volumes are a token of the good luck which has marked my life: They are survivors from the comprehensive and specialized thefts suffered by my boy-uncle’s other collections, as it were a robbery from the very distant grave of a child and a child’s inheritance which he never lived to enjoy: butterflies in frames, ancient coins, seashells, postage stamps, medieval manuscript fragments, and more, down

to an album of press clippings of John George’s prize-winning solutions to chess problems. All was rashly stored in an easily accessible corridor of my grandfather’s factory in Birmingham. The Hogarth book survived because unlike the other collections, it was kept, secretly I thought, or for safety perhaps, in the lowest compartment of a huge “magical” armoire with many drawers, large and small, in an unused room of my grandfather’s house near my mother’s in Birmingham, where I was born. Punch reigned in a corridor nearby. Visits to grandpa, an enthusiastic player of Swiss card games where I learned mild expletives in the Swiss language of his youth, always offered the prospect of my disappearing to muse for hours at a time upon the “secrets” Hogarth kept, as I thought, by him alone. They were revealed just to me, crouching over them, as a potential world imagined for me out there: an exciting world including sex, eroticism, violence, crime, drunkenness, and other forbidden behaviors, not forgetting laughter and tears. The rambunctious world of Hogarth is present in this book in a much-attenuated mid-Victorian form, but it is still there, at the behest of the ghost of Uncle John George.

acknowledgMentS  437

NOTES PROLOGUE

1. Patten, 2012, p. 48. 2. Martin, 1985, p. 9. 3. Grove, 2010, p. 223. INTRODUCTION: PREDECESSORS. FROM BROADSHEET TO ALBUM AND JOURNAL

1. Ruskin, 1908, vol. 38, p. 362 and vol. 35, p. 256. 2. The full title of the album, in the graphic arts collection of the Princeton University Library (at S-000165), runs “A Sketch of a passage in the life of Mr Pipp the Barber where inroads are made upon his peace of mind by the WIDOW PLUM, the fair grocer are duly registered by their mutual friend and admirer J.L.R.” 3. For a detailed exposition of this segment, with references, see Kunzle, 1990, p. 26–27. 4. Grove and Black, in their exhibition catalog The Invention of Comics, 2016, n.p., “1825,” and Grove in the adjunct Comic Invention, n.p., “The Candidates,” argues for William Heath’s hitherto unknown “The Coat” being the (world’s) first “comic strip in a comic,” as it appeared in the fortnightly The Glasgow Looking Glass, renamed The Northern Looking Glass 1825–1826. Heath had earlier done at least two military comic strips (Kunzle, 1973, pp. 383 and 388). The Glasgow magazine, dominated by Heath’s images, includes (unmentioned by Grove and Black) other, slighter comic strips: on the idle life of the King of France, the Story of a Ship, the Life of an Actress, The Life of a Soldier (twelve scenes in four issues), and Life of a Sailor. See also Gravett, 2014, p. 7, with reproduction p. 79. 5. See George, v.11, p. xlviii, and 244. The British Museum Print Room set (Satires 15983–15988) has no overall title while each plate has its own. A copy of The Heiress (not in the British Library) is in the De Young Museum, San Francisco. CHAPTER 1. GEORGE CRUIKSHANK: THE “NEW HOGARTH”?

1. Patten, 1996, vol. I, p. 229. 2. Patten, 1996, vol. I, p. 222; Jerrold, 1898. 3. Patten, 1996, vol. I, p. 226. 4. See Kunzle, 1983. 5. In London and Westminster Review 32 (April 1839), pp. 282–305. See Kunzle, 1974; and Kunzle, 2007, pp. 165–72, for Thackeray comic strips unpublished at the time. 6. Patten, 1996, vol. II, p. 198. All unattributed quotations are from this excellent chapter. 7. There is evidence of captions for the Life of a Thief, loosely related to the boy thief

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(never shown actually thieving) in The Drunkard’s Children (see appendix to my article in the Journal of British Art, forthcoming). 8. Cf. Jones, 1978, p. 87. 9. Vol. xiii (September), 1847, p. 92. 10. Fraser’s Magazine, August 1833, p. 190, cited by Wardroper, 1978, p. 213a. 11. Bates, 1879, p. 36, reporting contemporary criticism. 12. See Shiman, 1988, p. 25. 13. Yeomans, 2001, vol. 45, pp. 38–53 (after p. 43). 14. Steinbach, 2017, p. 150. 15. Skelly, 2014, p. 59, citing William Bates in 1878. 16. Couling’s documentary biography on the movement as a whole details Cruikshank’s many attendances at meetings without ever once mentioning that he was an artist and the author of The Bottle. 17. Paulson, 1965, p. 206. 18. Buss, 1874, p. 150. 19. In De Gevolgen van het Drankgebruik voorgesteld . . . Utrecht, J Bos Wz, 1891 (Vogler Archive, Grunwald Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), where Cruikshank’s captions are omitted. The wife, unable to refuse outright, “had to join in,” according to the lengthy Dutch commentary to pl. I. Later she reforms, repents, and provokes her own murder stemming from her violent accusations against her husband (as in Mackay). 20. Harrison, 1971, pp. 47 and 175; and Skelly, 2014, p. 56: insisting (p. 112) that the wife in Cruikshank is a willing accomplice, she aims at “squelching any attempt to read the couple as ‘drunkard’ husband and a ‘redeeming woman.’” 21. Punch, v. xv (Oct.?) 1848, pp. 176–77. 22. See Frith, 1888, vol. I, p. 346. 23. May, 1997, 5:2, p. 179. 24. Nadar, Journal pour Rire, February 14, 1851, and Petit Journal pour Rire 4 (1856), much abbreviated to twenty-eight drawings; Illustrirte Welt (Leipzig), 1860, no. 2 (also abbreviated). 25. Patten, 1996, vol. II, p. 269. 26. As I am kindly assured by Rachel Bairsto of the British Dental Association Museum in London, who finds evidence of school dental visits only toward the end of the century. 27. The Comic Album, a Book for every table (Orr, 1844), n.p. Cham was a contributor to the album. For his Jobard, see Kunzle, 2019, pp. 203 and 207. 28. Cited in Greve, 1930, p. 32. 29. For this, and for the dentist as a political metaphor in the nineteenth century, see Kunzle, 1989, and Kunzle, 1990, pp. 25, 279, and 372. 30. Kunzle, 1990, p. 79, Fig. 3.4. 31. Patten, 1996, vol. II, p. 410. 32. Punch cartoon of April 22, 1865, p. 160. 33. Patten II, p. 510.

CHAPTER 2. THE MAN IN THE MOON (1847–1849)

1. Fitzsimons, 1967, p. 13. See also Hansen, 1985, pp. 300–324. 2. The whole story, under the title L’Homme aux Cent Mille Ecus, reproduced in Kunzle, 2015, pp. 94–114, with brief analysis of the differences. 3. See Kunzle, 2015, pp. 166 and 179. 4. Spielmann, “The Rivals of Punch,” July 1895, p. 303, and Jerrold, 1910, p. 12. 5. Slater, 2002, p. 202. 6. Man in the Moon, v. II, p. 195. 7. Fitzsimons, 1967, p. 65 ff. 8. Leary, 2010, p. 26, and Prager, 1979, p. 85. 9. Private Eye is a popular satirical fortnightly that effectively eclipsed Punch, which finally ended in 1992. 10. Kunzle, 1990, Conclusion. 11. The Man in the Moon, vol. 2, 1848, p. 245. 12. Kunzle, 1990, p. 90a. I now regard the anecdote as spurious, for reasons set out in my book on Cham. There is no sign of Cham drawings in Punch at this time, the apocryphal story served to confirm Cham’s celebrity and facility. That Punch did make an approach to the star of French caricature is not unlikely, but the supposition that he made so many drawings on woodblocks specially supplied to him, is unlikely. The frequency of Cham’s visits to England is not in doubt. From 1842, after his first visit, his drawings are signed from the start (many in The Great Gun, 1844–1845). Six signed drawings did appear in Punch, but not until much later, in 1859. (See Kunzle, Cham, pp. 20–21.) On June 19, 1859, Cham wrote to Richard Doyle, care of the Punch offices, unaware that Doyle had quit the magazine over three years earlier, to recommend a friend to the editors there. (My thanks to Rodolphe Trouilleux for finding the relevant archival document.) See below, chapter 3, p. 73. 13. Whiteing, 1880. 14. His name appears on drawings in the very short-lived Life. The Mirror of the Million (four issues only, in February 1850). 15. Was there a label on the bed when it was a tourist attraction and seen by Cham in its original location in Ware, Hertfordshire, to explain his otherwise strange use of the word “dramatists?” The bed is said to be the single best-known object now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, three meters wide and able to accommodate at least four couples, made c. 1590 in Ware, to the design of Netherlander Hans Vredeman de Vries. 16. Did Cham initiate an icon of modern abstract art? Kasimir Malewitsch’s exhibition of a “Black Square” is credited as an icon of extreme abstract or concrete art and figures in a Barks-Disney comic strip as a prime example of “graphic novels looting art” (Dietrich Grünewald, 2019, p. 243).

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17. Kunzle, 2015, p. 113. 18. The sherry cobbler, a new cocktail under that name is first mentioned in the US in 1838 and celebrated by Dickens as a novelty in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844). 19. Southworth, 1941, p. 74. A useful and short social history. 20. As in Ford Madox Brown’s famous painting Last of England (1852–1855), inspired by the fate of pre-Raphaelite brother-member Thomas Woolner. 21. This was the same balloon conducted by Charles Green, the so-called “Columbus of the skies,” already famous for having flown from Cremhorne Gardens to Germany in 1836, a record of nonstop 480 miles. Celebrated as “The Great Balloon of Nassau,” it became the most famous of the century and its crash landing was much publicized. 22. Dabhoiwala, pp. 22–24. See also Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal, 2019. 23. See McNee, 2015, pp. 105–7; and Spielmann, Rivals . . . July 1895, pp. 654–66. CHAPTER 3. PUNCH—A HISTORY OF CULTURAL FRANCOPHILIA AND POLITICAL FRANCOPHOBIA

1. Title of Stephen Clarke’s “best-seller,” anachronistic absurdities, gratuitous crudities, and mounds of recondite anecdote. 2. Spielmann, 1895, p. 4. 3. Spielmann, 1895, p. 4. 4. Prager, 1979, p. 101. 5. Mainardi, 2017, p. 21ff. An excellent round-up of early Anglo-French graphic connections. 6. Prager, 1979, p. 34. 7. The one surviving issue is dated March 16, 1850. Spielmann, 1895, p. 56, mentions the journal as the “short-lived” brainchild of Watts Phillips. 8. Tombs, 2007, p. 337. 9. Extensive analysis of this little-regarded graphic novel in Kunzle, 1990, pp. 100–105. 10. I here combine bits of both captions and accompanying verse. 11. Filon, 1902. 12. A quick exchange: The Doyle outline style was first picked up within two weeks or so by L’Illustration on March 24, 1849, and passed into the Journal pour Rire on June 16. See Kunzle, 1990, p. 32, with comparative illustration of skating scenes p. 31. 13. Preceding Doyle’s Brown Jones and Robinson in Punch, we find Doré’s Les Travaux d’Hercule album of 1848, La Vie en Province, February–March 1849, and L’Homme aux Cent Mille Écus, of February–June 1849 based on The Man in the Moon’s Crindle. 14. Hippopotamus cartoon vol. 19 (1850), p. 162 (the poor creature is smiling!); prehistoric skeletons cartoon (ref. below): vol. 19, p. 136. Pilgrims to Rome (ref. below) vol. 20 (1851), p. 230.

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15. Thackeray, from Quarterly Review (ed. 1884), quoted by Hambourg, 1948, p. 20. 16. Hibbert, 1997, p. 375. 17. Travels Executed Around the World by Cham and his Umbrella, see Kunzle, 2019, ch. 17. 18. Vanity Fair, 1848, ch. 4, and passim elsewhere; Hibbert, 1997, p. 31. 19. Punch, v. 25 (July) 1853, p. 7. See Khanduri, 2014. 20. Houfe, 1995, pp. 27–28. 21. Analyzed in some detail in Kunzle, 1990, ch. 5. 22. I state this as a probability in Kunzle, 1990, p. 131b, and find it confirmed by a small paragraph in Punch of April 19, 1856, p. 152, under the heading, “The Charivari takes orders” officially “to cease to publish caricatures of Russia.” Punch began printing the date on each weekly issue from July 14, 1855. 23. Herbert, 2008, pp. 46 and 78. 24. Ernest Griset was born in Boulogne 1843, died in London 1907. He was brought to England by his parents during the 1848 Revolution, and “always regarded himself as British rather than French.” The added designation of the artist as French in the title to Part II while he mutilates the language like a true Englishman, may be an editorial joke. Griset must be drawing on a personal experience. See Spielmann, 1895, pp. 537–38. CHAPTER 4. DOYLE’S BARRY-EUX (BAYEUX) TAPESTRY

1. Wilson, 1985, p. 13. 2. Sam Knight reporting in the New Yorker on January 29, 2018. 3. Bernstein, 1987, p. 89. 4. Pivard and Shelton, 2011. There are several Bayeux parodies relating to more recent history: Hassall, 1915. 5. Bryant, 2005, pp. 58–59. 6. Punch v. 10, 1846, p. 145, c.f. Simpson, 1994, p. 28. 7. Bensimon, 2000, p. 28, argues that the invasion scare was taken quite seriously by press and parliament. 8. At the very time the Stothard lithographs were published, William Heath reengraved a “complete” edition of Hogarth (1820s–1830s), in which he or his publisher thought fit to conceal in a secret compartment his Before and After prints, where the sexual act is obviously to be inferred (Musset, 2005, sc. 48), omits the penis of the mustachioed naked (English) male and the pubic hair on the naked female reaching to embrace him. 9. The verse under scene 5 clearly refers to scene 4, and that under scene 6 (which lacks all pretense to an ending) refers to scene 3. 10. Bernstein, 1987, p. 16. 11. Disraeli, 1845, v. III, p. 24, etc. 12. Gibbs-Smith, 1973, p. 4. 13. Bernstein, 1987, p. 164.

CHAPTER 5. DOYLE: THE FOREIGN TOUR OF MESSRS

CHAPTER 7. JOHN LEECH AND MR. BRIGGS

BROWN, JONES AND ROBINSON (1854)

1. See Kunzle, 2015, pp. 31–32. 2. In this chapter, all page numbers in parentheses refer to the original page numbers in Doyle’s The Foreign Tour. 3. See Kunzle, 2015, p. 170. 4. There is a hilarious parody of the miniature German court of “Pumpernickel” (based on Weimar, where Thackeray visited in 1830–1831), with similarities to Doyle’s here, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (ch. 62). 5. In the cautious Fliegende Blätter, hats “offensive to the police” because similar to those worn by revolutionaries or radicals, are cause for arrests (see Kunzle, 1990, pp. 216b and 224a). CHAPTER 6. FRANCOPHOBIA: THE FLIGHT OF LOUISPHILIPPE, IN PUPPET SHOW (1848), AND LOUISPETIT AND HIS BIRD IN DIOGENES (1855)

1. Spielmann, p. 156. 2. According to Ribeyre, 1884, p. 186. 3. Brown, 1963, pp. 70–73. 4. Teyssier, 2010, p. 397. 5. Teyssier, 2010, p. 403. The account in Stoeckl, 1957, reads like a detective thriller. See also André Castelot, 1994. The escape in a cab was used by Thackeray in Vanity Fair at the very moment he was describing (in ch. 55) Becky Sharp’s French maid escaping thus with her mistress’s trinkets. 6. Stoeckl, 1957, p. 287. 7. The habit is recorded by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities (1859, Book III, Ch. IV), where a model of “The Little Sainte Guillotine,” as popularly canonized, was “worn on the breasts [of Republican fanatics] from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed to and believed in, where the Cross was denied.” In 1848, however, it was the army that was killing the Republicans. Dickens’s novel, like Watts Phillips’s little album, added to the ever-simmering Francophobia. 8. Showing how the Honourable Mr Teddington Locke M.P. was not returned for the incorruptible Borough of Bubengrub, drawn and etched by Watts Phillips from notions by Edward Grant. Ackermann, c. 1850. 9. Scully, 2011, p. 153. 10. Spielmann, 1895, pp. 654–66. 11. Cartoon by Sears and Watts Phillips, no. 64, p. 118. 12. Bresler, 1999, p. xix. 13. Bresler, 1999, p. 153. 14. Bresler, 1999, p. 161. 15. Treadmills of some kind were dreaded punishment in English prisons, but certainly not used on this Napoleon. 16. Bresler, 1999, p. 169. 17. Guérard, 1943, p. 168.

1. Quarterly Review, December 1854, pp. 75–76. 2. Houfe, 1984, p. 230 (ref. comic press); Tidy, 1931, p. 12 (ref. Dickens and Thackeray); Houfe, 1984, p. 234 (ref. Gavarni and Cham). 3. Kitton, 1883, p. 26. 4. Houfe, 1984, pp. 230–32, and Filon, 1902, p. 260. 5. Sambourne, 1892, pp. 42–46. 6. Mackay, 1877, vol. 2, p. 304. 7. Cited in Tidy, p. 45. 8. Bryant and Heneage, 1994, p. 136. 9. See Wilson, 2003, p. 383. 10. Vol. 16 (1849), pp. 64, 168, 177, 190, 200, 210, 222, 242, 252. 11. Spielmann, 1895, pp. 425–26. 12. Kunzle, 1990, pp. 328–29. 13. The whole Housekeeping to Horsekeeping sequence (pp. 213–14) starts in Punch, February 1849, v. XVI, p. 64: for purposes of reproduction I have grouped it to run together, originally appearing p. 177 (when “The Loose Slate” is added to the running title), then 190, 200, 210, 222, 242 (when subtitle dropped). On p. 252 the sequence evolves into Pleasures of Horsekeeping, continuing v. XVII, pp. 3, 36. There is an acceleration attesting to the popularity of the continuous story with its sixteen drawings, from the initial design intended as a one-off in February, then a gap until April (two drawings), followed by four in May, four in June, and four in July. 14. Punch 1849, v. XVII, pp. 3, 16, 36, 116 (Cork Gent.), 156, 166, 176. 15. Spielmann, 1895, p. 131. 16. Volume and page numbers, each referring to a different episode described here in one sentence, are as follows: Punch, 1849, v. XVI, pp. 166, 176, 196, 216, 228. 1850, v. XVII, pp. 14, 40, 60, 64, 84 (two drawings), 212. 1850, v. XVIII, pp. 78, 94, 102, 126, 216, 266. 1851, v. XX, pp. 14, 114, 138 [Mr. Briggs Rides his Match, 162–64], 256. 1851, v. XXI, pp. 48, 88, 98 (two drawings) 118, 127, 180, 214 (Brighton, see our text above), 224 (two drawings). 17. Frith, 1891, pp. 165–67. An oil sketch of Halliday is reproduced in Houfe, 1984, col. pl. 28, p. 166. 18. Spielmann, 1895, p. 425, even gives Tom Noddy precedence over Briggs. 19. Spielmann, 1895, p. 426. 20. Houfe, 1984, p. 184, from where I take the date “next year, 1857.” A fuller version by Kitton, 1883, p. 360, in a long anecdote said to have been told brilliantly, with perfect mimicry, by the gentle Leech himself to Millais, puts the date at 1850, and adds an incident testifying to the elderly, unpopular host’s selfishness and narcissism. I did not find the offending cartoon in Punch 1850, or elsewhere. 21. Wilson, 2007, p. 586.

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22. He asks his friend Charles Adams for “a rocking horse, or a clothes horse, or any horse excessively quiet and accommodating.” (Houfe, 1984, p. 115; cf. Tidy, 1931, p. 35.) 23. Harrison, J.F.C., 1971, pp. 94–95. 24. Much detail is given in Houfe’s excellent penultimate chapter (1984). 25. See Spielmann, 1895, p. 530, noting that Bowers, a keen and experienced huntswoman herself and encouraged by Leech, unlike him used recognizable persons in her cartoons, which caused her some trouble. The quality of her drawing was never high, to judge by her Canters in Crampshire (1878). CHAPTER 8. THOMAS ONWHYN: THE BROWNS VISIT THE GREAT EXPOSITION OF 1851

1. Thomas Onwhyn (1814–1886) is credited by Houfe, 1996, with “a score” of pullout or panorama books evincing a “real humour.” 2. Besant, 2005, pp. 8 and 20. 3. By the editor (Samuel Prout Newcombe) of Pleasant Pages, A Journal of Instruction for the Family and the School, with the British Library stamp of June 7, 1851; Doyle’s book bears the stamp 29 August. 4. As Onwhyn shows in another “roller album” in forty-four drawings of as many selected exhibits, entitled Mr Goggleyes Visit to the Exhibition of National Industry . . . with a catalogue . . . and remarks . . . published by Timy Takamin, one shilling, the (official) catalogue is drawn as bigger than the reader, and the exhibits, fancifully numbered from one to many millions, range from the cruel (wastepaper mounds of Irish grievances and evidence of poverty), to the fancifully imaginative in the invention of novel household objects and street ornaments, and a dream-world of balloon-supported castles in the air, a machine for extracting sunbeams from cucumber and the futuristic aeronautical steam engine. Other Onwhyn roller albums, for which we lack space, offered simple stories, like The Courtship, Marriage and Honeymoon of Mr Tiddlely (sic) Winks, shorter at sixpence and fifteen pictures. Mr Winks is mistakenly told his new wife has gone without him to France, where he is arrested for having no passport, and returns to find her awaiting him on the white cliffs of Dover. 5. To avoid footnote litter, all references in this chapter to Punch, which was not dated at this period, are grouped together and signaled by code words in the last footnote. 6. Cited in Langdon-Davies, 1971, chs. I and IV. 7. Auerbach, 1999, p. 180 ff. 8. Langdon-Davies, 1971, ch. I. 9. Davis, 1999, p. 165.

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10. Langdon-Davies, 1971, ch. iv. Punch references: v. 20: G.E. as steamer saving government, p. 237. Where are the foreigners, p. 207. Black Virginian slave, p. 236. Conspirators and Assassins, p. 193. Beds in chest-of-drawers and American Indian drunken riot: Punch’s Almanack for 1851. Dinner-time at the Crystal Palace: v. 21, p. 16. CHAPTER 9. TENNIEL AND THE WILD BEAST HUNT IN INDIA (1853); GRISET’S AND PODGER’S ELEPHANTS.

1. See Simpson, 1994. 2. Wilson, 2007, p. 272. 3. Herbert, 2008, p. 31. 4. Baldwin, 1883, with reminiscences dating back to the early 1860s. See p. 21. 5. Blaine, 2016, p. 27 (1st edition, 1858). 6. Stramek, 2006, pp. 659–80. Cf. Brittlebank, 1995, pp. 257–69. 7. Stramek, 2006, p. 662 (as in 4th edition, 1869). 8. See Khanduri, 2014, p. 5. 9. See Campbell, 2nd ed. 1844, 4th ed. 1869. The same characterization is used in the Illustrated Magazine of Art v. 3, no. 16 (1854), pp. 278–82. 10. Baldwin, pp. 147, 150. 11. Hibbert, 1997, pp. 208 and 36. 12. Baden-Powell, 1918, pp. 38 and 43 (reflecting India in the 1870s). 13. Campbell, 1853, p. xx, or Illustrated Magazine of Art, 1854. 14. Baldwin, 1883, p. 133. 15. Baldwin, 1883, pp. 91–93. 16. See Taylor, 2004, pp. 30–48. He cites Reynold’s Newspaper of March 5, 1876, which connects hunting at home with brutalities and massacres of animals and peoples in the colonies. 17. Elephant shooting was prohibited in most of India in 1870, and not long after this “some of the finest game animals” were found near extinction. See Stebbing, 1920, p. vii. 18. Kunzle, 2019, pp. 14–16. 19. Spielmann, 1895, pp. 537–38. His reference to the “first seen” drawing in v. 54 (1868), p. 61, is incorrect. 20. See extensive blog, https://nonsenselit.com/2009/08/22/ cassowary-vs-missionary. 21. See Kunzle, 2018, ch. 18. 22. Mayne, 1924, p. 342. 23. Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa (sic) (1644–1709), hetman of Cossack-controlled Ukraine, turned against the Russians and joined the Swedes during the Second Northern War (1700–1721) between Charles XII of Sweden and Tsar Peter I. With Riviere, we omit his historicity and refer only to the legend. The primary English-language source, Hubert Babinski, The Mazeppa Legend in European Romanticism, 1974, weak on the English tradition, is here supplemented from other sources. Mazepa remained

a controversial figure, seen irrespective of the impossible, romantic legend, as traitor to Tsar Peter but founder (today) of an independent Ukraine. Remarkably, the Mazepa legend survives in Russia and Ukraine even today, in the form of mazepintsy (mazepaists), a derogatory shibboleth for those “subversives” advocating an independent Ukraine. In 2009, Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko established a new award called the Cross of Ivan Mazepa, to honor significant contributions to Ukrainian nationalism, culture, and heritage. 24. Mankovitz, pp. 170–71. 25. Mankovitz, p. 103, citing poem by young American poet Charles Stoddard. 26. Falk, p. 259. Most of the other quotations are from this excellent, sprightly full-length biography. Astley’s playbill is reproduced opposite p. 86. The Mazeppa story was subject to immense fictionalized extensions which must have increased its attraction, when staged, to the mass audience formed on “penny dreadful” literature. Oddly, in the huge, cheaply printed novel totaling perhaps three-quarters of a million words on 878 pages, James Malcolm Rymer’s (anonymous) Mazeppa or the Wild Horse of Tartary (1850), the horse is scarcely present, and never in the numerous illustrations. 27. Cited by Sabin, 1996, p. 14. CHAPTER 10. CHARLES KEENE: FUN WITH THE VOLUNTEERS AND TRAVELS ABROAD

1. Houfe in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and Pennell, 1897, p. 265. 2. Beckett, 1982, p. 11. 3. Beckett, 1982, p. 96. 4. Layard, 1892, p. 70. 5. Analyzed in Kunzle, 1990, ch. 7. 6. Layard, 1892, p. 60. 7. Kunzle, 1990, pp. 323–24. 8. Citations of 1866 in Colley, 2010, p. 51. CHAPTER 11. DU MAURIER: DARWIN AND A TASTE FOR TALL

1. Various strips published in German broadsheets and journals in the early 1860s were wordless, but probably unknown to Du Maurier. English Busch editions were published in 1868 and in early 1872. 2. Ormond, 1969, p. 315. 3. Busch’s comparable Frog and two Ducks (1861/62) depicts the frog, by fighting back, avoiding being eaten by the ducks. 4. Boddice, 2008, p. 237. An excellent history and analysis. 5. I quote from his autobiographical novel, Peter Ibbetson, 1963, p. 17. 6. Kunzle, 1990, figs. 12.18 and 12.20.

7. Du Maurier, 1963, p. 21. 8. Ormond, 1969, p. 1. 9. Preface by Daphne Du Maurier in Du Maurier, 1963, p. ix. 10. Ormond, 1969, p. 311. 11. Du Maurier, 1963, p. 29. 12. Punch, November 10, 1883, p. 21; and Kunzle, 2004, pp. 109–10. 13. Vers Nonsensiques à l’usage des Familles Anglaises par Anatole de Lester-scouère. CHAPTER 12. MCCONNELL’S WILDERSPIN IN TOWN TALK, 1858–1859

1. Spielmann, 1895, pp. 460–61. 2. Dated 1860, the first edition was advertised in October and entered the British Library in November. The second edition of 1862 (?) is titled The Funny Adventures of Mr Wilderspin, Embracing his Courting, Sporting, Theatrical, Parliamentary, Gambling and Matrimonial Career in his Celebrated Journey Through Life. 3. See Kunzle, 1990, ch. 15, “Movement before Movies.” CHAPTER 13. ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS AND OTHER JOURNALS

1. Vizetelly, 1893, p. 260, tells us Cham was in England “a short time” in the autumn of 1843, doing caricatures of the British royal family. Had he sent in advance some of his early fairy-tale parodies? 2. Houfe, 1996, p. 29. Microfilm and then digitization of the whole magazine made it impossible for me to do more than check the Christmastime issues. 3. Spielmann, 1895, p. 492, tells us that more than “forty drawings were engraved for Punch’s pages, to appear a page each week,” before they were transferred to the ILN. He gives the wrong date of 1850 for the circulation of the book to publishers. 4. As cited from his Christmas Stories, “Come swift to comfort me, the Pantomime—stupendous Phenomenon!—when clowns are shot from loaded mortars into the great chandelier . . .” (in Brown, 1963, p. 242). 5. Examples reproduced in Kunzle, 1990, pp. 295–97. 6. See “A Barbarous Proceeding” of 1888 (Kunzle, 1990, p. 356, Fig. 15.24), where the client’s whole body is swept into a steep backward angle by the electrified rotary brush. CHAPTER 14. AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING: MARIE DUVAL IN JUDY, 1867–1870, WITH PERCY CRUIKSHANK ON THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

1. See Kunzle, 1990, pp. 324–25. 2. Gange, 2016, p. 168.

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3. Election address, Judy, Preface to v. 3, October 1868. 4. For the comic albums and a detailed account of Ally’s stellar career through the 1870s and beyond, see Kunzle, 1990, pp. 317–22. 5. Judy, August 21, September 4 and October 2, 1867. 6. See the Kunzle overlapping articles “The First Ally Sloper,” 1985, “Marie Duval and Ally Sloper,” 1986, and “Marie Duval—A Caricaturist Rediscovered,” 1986, and in my 1990 book, p. 317. All are ignored by a more recent article under the authority of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, by the reputed comics historian Denis Gifford, who had earlier (Victorian Comics, 1975, p. 26) attributed the unsigned Mysteries of Loan and Discount to Marie Duval (alone), and in the ODNB limited Duval’s participation in general to “inking his (Ross’s) penciled roughs.” Gifford thus perpetuates the general crediting to Ross of the whole Duval oeuvre by Gilbert Dalziel, who, having bought Judy in 1872, must have known better, but started the mischief in his Record of Fifty Years Work (1901, reprint 1978, p. 320): “His pages of humorous pictures [in Judy] were generally signed ‘Marie Duval.’” Dalziel ignores as do later commentators the earliest and most reliable source on this controverted matter: Ellen Clayton in her English Female Artists, who makes Duval solely responsible for a character “irresistibly droll” and “absurdly comic” with “an undercurrent of serious reflections, sometimes with a touch of strange pathos.” Clayton does not even mention longtime partner Charles Ross. From her detailed account of the terrible accident to the actress’s leg that cut short a successful career on the stage, she obviously knew Duval well. Personally, she describes her as the only living artist (not excluding Charles Keene), who could provoke laughter, having created in Ally Sloper “a pronounced character and familiar friend, like Micawber” (Clayton, vol. II, 1876, pp. 330–33). Just out, as I write and you read this, the latest word: see Grennan. 7. Reproduced in Horne, 1965, rev. ed. 1990, between pp. 138 and 139. See also Kunzle, Cham, p. 71, and Fig. 3.23. 8. The generals, kindly identified for me by Robert Tombs, must be Charles Abel Douay, killed at Wissenberg, and Felix-Charles Douay, who capitulated at Sedan on September 1.

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9. Horne, 1965, pp. 38–39, and p. 69. 10. Horne, 1989. 11. The very hostile Richard Cobb in his foreword to Horne, p. xiv. 12. It is certain that zoo animals were slaughtered to allay the hunger of the besieged, and elephants were also sacrificed. See Hollis Clayson, Paris in Danger: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1879–1871), 2002, p. 175. 13. Horne, p. 406 and (preceding citation) p. 196. 14. Horne, p. 426. 15. See excellent chapter in Scully, 2012, pp. 172–80; and chapter 10 for views of the novelists. 16. Scully, 2011, p. 95, and Ribner, 2017, p. 5. 17. Students of the popular (caricatural) view of the war, from British, French, and German sources, would profit from these little-known collections of journal cuttings, compiled, and donated in 1889, by Frédéric Justen in multiple sets of large volumes to the British Library archives: Napoléon et la Caricature Anglaise de 1848–1872, London, 1873, 3 vols. (ending in 1870), B.L. 1761.a.12); Napoléon III devant la presse contemporaine en 1873 (sic, down to 1870), 3 vols., English, French, and German, etc. This includes a long comic strip by Louis Jagnet, Les Aventures Illustrées de Louis Verhuel dit Bonaparte. Finally, there is the Collection de caricatures et de charges pour server à l’histoire de la guerre et de la Révolution de 1870–1871, 6 +3 vols B.L. 14001.g.41. Vol. 7 here covers the Commune, and is wholly hostile; vols. 8–9 give German material, all favorable to Germany; vol. 10 (at CUP 1001./1) consists of erotica. See Morna Daniels, British Library Journal, 2005, art. 5. 18. Judy, November 5, 1873, p. 30. 19. Sir E. Strachey, 1943, Introduction. EPILOGUE. REBIRTH OF A CHANGELING

1. See Gifford, 1976; Carpenter, 1981–1983; and overview in Kunzle, 1990, pp. 329–33. 2. Sambourne, pp. 42–45.

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Photo courtesy of Becca wilson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Kunzle is distinguished professor emeritus of art history at the University of California. Kunzle’s two large pioneering volumes on the history of the comic strip (1540–1825, 1826–1895) were acclaimed over the last generation for their discovery, reproduction, and analysis of a huge quantity of unknown and little-known material from all over Europe. His work on a broad array of more or less related topics, globally ranging, has given him a broad perspective on what has been long since the biggest active iconographic field in the world. His most recent book preceding this one is a monumental tome on the major prolific French comic strip artist and caricaturist known as CHAM (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), a figure more popular in his time than (even) Daumier.