Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 2 of 4.—1857-1874

Mr. L. Figuier, in the Thesis which precedes his interesting work on the World before the Flood, condemns the practice of awakening the youthful mind to admiration by means of fables and fairy tales, and recommends, in lieu thereof, the study of the Nature History of the World in which we live. Fired by this advice, we have tried the experiment on our eldest, an imaginative boy of six. We have cut off his "Cinderella" and his "Puss in Boots," and introduced him to some of the more peaceful Fauna of the pre-Adamite world, as they appear restored in Mr. Figuier's book. The poor boy has not had a decent nights rest ever since!

Lord Malmesbury considers that it is useless to teach modern languages at the Public Schools, "as parents can easily procure such instruction for their children by hiring foreign nurses." Observe the delight of four young gentlemen who have returned from Harrow for the holidays, and discover that their parents have procured French and German instruction for them. Also observe the envy of the young and untutored clown.

A notable landmark in the annals of preparatory and public school education is reached in 1869, when Punch quoted the following epoch-marking advertisement: —

"Grammar School, W – R – Wanted immediately, a Second Assistant Master, to teach thoroughly writing and arithmetic, also junior English subjects. Must be a good cricketer and round-arm bowler. Character to bear the strictest investigation. Salary £40, increasing to £60."

Punch on Co-Education

The resounding fame of W. G. Grace, who began his great career in first-class cricket in 1863, at the age of 15, and had just reached his majority, was doubtless responsible for this new educational departure. The salary was certainly not exorbitant, but the advent of the cricket-master moves no sympathy in Punch. He admits the force of the proverb that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," but asks "does not Jack at some schools play a little to excess?" and speculates on the amazement which the schoolmaster abroad would feel in reading this announcement. On the other hand, over-pressure and "cramming" were equally distasteful to Punch, who was seriously perturbed by the sensational accounts given in 1870 of the breakdown of Woolwich candidates.

Mr. Punch is of opinion that a polite and easy bearing towards the opposite sex (tempered, of course, with propriety and discretion) cannot be inculcated at too early an age. He therefore recommends that whenever an Institute for Young Ladies happens to meet an Academy for Young Gentlemen, they should all be formally introduced to each other, and allowed to take their walks abroad in company.

Co-education had not yet emerged on the horizon of practical educational politics, and the plea put forward in a picture by Du Maurier for a mixed "crocodile" cannot be seriously entertained. The artist suggests that whenever an Institute for Young Ladies happens to meet an Academy for Young Gentlemen they should all be formally introduced to one another and allowed to take their walks abroad in company. The question of corporal punishment was raised by a lively correspondence in The Times, towards the close of 1872, on the Winchester practice of "tunding" with a ground-ash or cricket-stump. The action was general, the father of the boy whose punishment by a prefect had started the correspondence, the headmaster, Dr. Ridding, "in English less classical than queer," and sundry old Wykehamists all joining in. Punch was at first scandalized by the brutality with which the prefects exercised their disciplinary powers, but the spirit and good sense showed by the victim caused him to modify his view: —

 
His punishment, while he feels it unjust
He takes without blather or ban:
Yes, out of the lot who've kicked up a dust,
The boy is the Man.
 

At the beginning of the same year the invasion of the public schools by the new plutocracy, as described by a correspondent in the Morning Post, who assumed the unfortunate pseudonym of "Pavidus," impelled Punch to some outspoken comment. "Pavidus" complained that the standard in tips and pocket-money had been unduly raised by the young cotton-lords – boys who came back with £5 as a minimum. Punch finds the root of the evil in the perversion of the public schools from their original intention – to educate the sons of poor gentlemen – and suggests that if the "nobs" don't like their sons associating with young plutocrats, they should get up poor schools of their own and keep the high-bred paupers select. A similar situation has arisen since the war, but the difficulty has been solved without snobbery or squealing. Parents who cannot afford to send their sons to schools with which their families have been associated for generations, send them elsewhere, but they do not "make a song about it."

Arthur (on pony): "Hollo! What have you got on your heads?"

Juvenile Swell: "Why, you see, every snob wears a cap or a wide-awake now; so the men of our school have returned to the old Chimney Pot!"

(As paterfamilias we are sorry to say that we have observed this monstrosity many times this Christmas.)

University Reform

There remain the Universities, the apex of the educational pyramid. The Universities Commission was not appointed till 1872. Its report on the income and property of Oxford and Cambridge was not published till October 1874, and the Universities' Act was not passed till 1877. Punch's contributions to the discussions which arose over University Reform nearly always take the form of hostile criticism of the champions of "no change," and he devotes by far the greater amount of space to the castigation of Oxford conservatives and non-resident reactionaries. The vote on the institution of the non-Collegiate or "unattached" system in 1868 furnished Punch with the materials for a comprehensive indictment of all his pet Oxford aversions. In the wail of the Mediævalists, headed "An Oxford Miserere," Punch ranges himself on the side of the reformers; Sir John, afterwards Lord Coleridge, who had taken an active part in the successful movement for the abolition of religious tests in the Universities; Conington, the distinguished Latinist and editor of Virgil; Raper, the well-known Fellow of Trinity College, who, under more than one President, was the power behind the throne; and Jowett, who with Stanley and Maurice, had always been supported by Punch in his espousal of "modernist" views.

When Mr. Meyrick, an Oxford Don, expressed his satisfaction that our Educational System was not that of the Germans, Punch was unable to echo his complacency, and went so far as to wish that "our Dons and Fellows were but as these Germans"; but it may be pleaded in extenuation of his offence that the doctrine of "Kultur" was less vocal in the 'sixties, and that German professors and teachers were not then so firmly harnessed to the car of "Machtpolitik." Punch little thought that some fifty years later Admiral Tirpitz would admit that the most formidable opponent of Germany was the "polo-playing Englishman." The notion that pastime was overdone finds vent in the "Chant for College Athletes": —

 
How doth the busy Undergrad
Improve each shining hour,
Loving each new athletic "fad"
To show his muscles' power!
 
 
In feats of strength and games of skill
His time must all be passed,
Heedless that, 'spite of cram, he will
Be sorely plucked at last.
 

Affluent College Servants

Over-athleticism, however, was not the only ground of complaint against education at the older Universities in the 'sixties. The high cost of living for undergraduates, owing to the extortion of local tradesmen and the perquisites of college servants, provoked a correspondence in The Times in the winter of 1865. Punch ironically affected to defend the retail "profiteers." His College butler in "The Undergraduates' Rebellion" associates himself with the College Dean as the victim of a mutiny of meanness, and the accompanying cartoon rubs in the point, a stout butcher addressing an equally stout Don, engaged in cutting a loaf, with the words, "Wery low them letters in the papers, Mr. Dean! Wery 'ard on both of us, Sir – my beef and your bread-an'-butter!" Punch's satire was justified by the fortunes notoriously made at the time and for many years afterwards by College cooks and butlers, whose incomes sometimes exceeded those of the Heads of Houses. More than ten years later a Christ Church "Scout" bitterly complained of the passing of the good old times. As he put it, "Instead of taking food home out of College, I has to bring it in."

INVENTIONS, NOVELTIES AND FORECASTS

Railways, their dangers and inconveniences, continue throughout this period to furnish Punch with a never-ending theme of criticism and complaint; nor need we altogether wonder when it is remembered that it was not until 1861 that communication between guard and engine driver was established on the Eastern Counties Railway, and then at first only on express and fast trains;¹⁰ and again, that it was not until 1873 that sleeping carriages were first introduced. The murder of Mr. Briggs by Müller on the North London line on July 9, 1864, created a scare amongst nervous passengers, which even the introduction of the corridor carriage has not altogether allayed. But, from the point of view of a Londoner, the most notable feature in railway development was the extension of intra-urban facilities which grew out of the Act of 1853, though the construction of the Underground did not begin till the spring of 1860, and it was not opened for traffic, in its original and limited range, till January, 1863. The completion of the Inner and the addition of the Outer Circle followed; the Swiss Cottage extension was not opened till 1868; but Highgate and many other suburbs remained isolated until the coming of the tubes.

The "Tuppenny Tube" was not opened till June, 1900, but nearly forty years earlier we read in Punch that "amongst the new railway projects, it seems there is to be a tubular underground from Regent's Circus to the Bank." The plea for cheap workmen's trains to the suburbs in the spring of 1870 only surprises us now by its having waited so long to be granted.

In the realm of imaginative forecast, one may note Du Maurier's nightmare picture of aerial trains to Paris in 1870, and the burlesque charter for an aerial railway company in 1872. But the project of a Channel tunnel had long been seriously considered, though the experimental borings were not made till 1876.¹¹ Ten years earlier Punch had indulged in some fantastic speculations on the result of the preliminary trials conducted by French and English engineers, with Sir John Hawkshaw at the head of the latter.

A patent for pneumatic tyres had been taken out in the 'forties; bicycles and tricycles came in at the end of the 'sixties; but twenty years were to elapse before the boneshaker and the "ordinary" – that wonderful and perilous machine – gave place to the "safety." In 1868 and 1869 references abound to velocipedes – the word "bicycle" had not yet established itself – and in the Almanack for 1869 there is a picture of a strange mechanism called the "Rantoone," a tricycle with two large wheels behind and a small guiding wheel in front. It is also mentioned in Henry Kingsley's Boy in Grey, and Crawley's Manly Games for Boys. But the bicycle, as we know it, the most momentous addition to the resources of locomotion between the coming of the steam engine and the advent of the petrol-driven motor, was only looming in the future; it was little more than a plaything in the period under review.

THE RANTOONE

The Cover Side. 10.45 a.m. Spriggins comes up with the Hunt on his favourite "Rantoone."

10.50. "For'ard Away!" Spriggins gets along famously.

10.55. "Tally-Ho!" Spriggins realizes the sensation of being "run away with."

10.56. "Yoicks!" Spriggins learns what a "cropper" means.

11.56. Five miles from everywhere.

Telegraph wires first began to spread their overhead network in London in 1859; the District Telegraph Company was started in 1860. Ten years later Punch celebrates the reduction of the fee for a twenty-word telegram to one shilling. Of the use of telegraphy in war he expressed considerable scepticism, on the ground that it would lead to endless contradictory rumours.

That Tummas met as he was a-comin' whoam – "Ta looked like a man a ridin' 'pon nawthin'!"

The Atlantic Cable

The most notable advance in telegraphy, however, was that of the long-distance cables. The year 1858 abounds in references to the second and third attempts to span the Atlantic. Frequent failures delayed the achievement of the enterprise for several years. In 1865 Punch published a series of reports purporting to come from the Great Eastern, then engaged in laying the cable, but it was not until the summer of 1866 that he was able to record the completion of the task: —

A Parliamentary week never ended with a more gratifying incident. A Minister, Mr. Hunt, stated that the Atlantic Telegraph had been laid to America, an ex-Minister, Mr. Childers, confirmed the fact, and an Honourable Member held in his hand a signal that had just arrived. Mr. Punch instantly sent Mr. Johnson a peremptory signal to liquor severely.

Undoubtedly the record of the marvels of applied science kept by Punch, and the forecasts of further extension in which he indulged, come home to us more closely in connexion with inventions for use in warfare. The unrealized projects of Captain Warner have been described in the previous volume. A liquid-fire bomb or incendiary shell, and an incendiary rifle-bullet attracted attention early in 1859. But the lessons of the American War of 1861-1865 gave Punch occasion to think sometimes seriously, and even with flashes of remarkable insight, on the possibilities of future warfare. His old distrust of armoured ships as "ferreous freaks" was not entirely dispelled by the triumph of the monitor; he gives us a picture of a new iron-clad mistaken for a Noah's Ark, and speaks of the new types as flat-irons. He admits that the action between the Merrimac and the Monitor conclusively proves that one iron-clad ship is a match for several wooden ships carrying more and heavier guns; but if there are to be no ships of war but iron ships, and iron ships are mutually shot-proof, he is impelled to the further conclusion that naval war in the future may end in an inconclusive stalemate: —

Ships being rendered practically invulnerable, any two vessels of war belonging to hostile nations will, hereafter, meeting on the high seas, each find itself unable to injure the other and therefore be obliged to part in peace, the result of their collision having been as nearly as possible the opposite to that of the conflict between the Kilkenny Cats.

From such a prospect Punch professes to derive hope; but there is more sagacity in the "Farewell to the Fleet" which followed three weeks later, a valediction which in its last stanza crudely anticipates the pre-and post-war warnings of Admiral Sir Percy Scott: —

 
Now farewell, my trim three-decker,
Sails and spars and all farewell;
Iron's proved of wood a wrecker,
Where 'twill steer us who can tell?
 
 
In glorious Nelson's days, d'ye mind them,
Our tars were sailors every inch:
Stout hearts, with pigtails stout behind them,
And ne'er a man to skulk or flinch.
 
 
But now – my dear eyes! British sailors
Half soldiers and half stokers are;
And if we manned the fleet with tailors,
'Twould in a month be fit for war.
 
 
Bomb-proof, hull-sunk, iron-roofed, we steam on,
Nor ball nor boarder fear we now;
And when our foe we run abeam on,
He sinks at once beneath our prow.
 
 
Them Yankee swabs, from shot a-shrinking:
Fight under water, so they tells;
Dear eyes! our Navy soon, I'm thinking,
Will be a fleet of diving bells.
 

The Navy of the Future

But by far the best illustration of the way in which the course of the war caused Mr. Punch to think furiously, fantastically, but by no means foolishly, is to be found in the fantasy headed, "A Flying Island wanted": —

Will somebody please invent for us an Island of Laputa?

It would save a mint of money in plated ships, and Armstrong guns, and Shoeburyness experiments. Although we are at peace, a most expensive war is raging between gunmakers and shipbuilders, and so far as one can learn, there seem but little hopes of stopping it. First the guns will gain the day, and then the ships will be built stronger until they are ball-proof, then bigger guns will come, and then still stronger ships; and so the battle will go on, and victories alternately be won by either side, and the Queen's powder be burnt at a most tremendous rate, so long as Mr. Bull agrees to stand the shot.

If the Invention War goes on much longer than it has done, we quite expect to hear of the construction of a cannon that shall throw a ball as big as the Ball upon St. Paul's, and of a mortar that shall pitch a shell as large round as the dome. Indeed, we fancy that in course of time conical shot will equal the Big Pyramid of Egypt, and that guns will be invented of sufficient power to throw such shot across from Brighton to Boulogne.

Now, if somebody would just invent a Flying Island, and present us with the patent, this costly fight between artillerists and shield-makers would probably soon cease. There would be no need then of our Army and our Navy, our big guns and our block ships, our field pieces and forts. Whenever any nation dared to pick a quarrel with us, all that we should have to do would be to let our Flying Island drop upon their heads, and squash their fleets and forces flat at one fell swoop.

The development of long-range artillery has fulfilled Punch's fancy. And we have become a flying island; but, unfortunately, the power of swooping from the skies is shared by other countries. As for ascents into the upper air, it was in the same year (1862) that the long unbroken record in altitude was made by Coxwell and Glaisher in the old-fashioned balloon. There is a reference to the Aeronautical Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in 1868; but the disaster which befell the Belgian, de Groof, in July, 1874, while attempting to descend from a balloon in a newly invented parachute, elicited a decidedly obscurantist comment: —

DE GROOF

(Killed in attempting to Fly, July 9, 1874)

 
He who provides for all beneath the sky,
Made men to walk, as He made birds to fly;
Then let man stick to earth, and have the sense
Not to fly in the face of Providence!
 

The Coming of the Typewriter

Cigarettes had come in with the Crimean War. In 1858 Punch suggested an improved passport with a photograph. To the same year belong the introduction of the word "dipsomaniac," spirit-drawing (a forerunner of spirit-photographs), Punch's first mention of Schweppe's soda water and of synthetic substitutes for food, and his prediction of the formation of a Camel Corps. Aerated bread, and the magnetic hair brush – supposed to restore the pigment to grey hair by drawing out the iron in the blood – were among the novelties of 1860; hair-brushing by machinery was introduced in 1864, and the sewing machine makes its debut in Punch in 1866. An even more epoch-making invention, which ranks among the most momentous products of the age in its far-reaching results on commerce, journalism, literature and the whole social system, was the type-writer, exhibited in London in 1867: —

GOOD NEWS FOR BAD WRITERS

It is surprising what discoveries are made in the dead season. Here is one, for instance, the account of which has recently been snipped out by the scissors of many a sub-editor: —

"Writing superseded. Mr. Pratt, of Alabama, is the inventor of a typewriting machine, lately exhibited to the London Society of Arts, which is said to print a man's thoughts twice as fast as he can write them with the present process. By a sort of piano arrangement the letters are brought in contact with carbonized paper, which is moved by the same manipulation."

Every author his own printer! What a happy state of things! No more struggles to write legibly with nibless tavern-pens; no more labour in deciphering the hieroglyphs of hasty writers. Literary work will be in future merely play – on the piano. The future Locke may write his essays by a touch upon the keys.

In this inventive age there really is no saying where discovery will stop. Now that authors are to put their thoughts in print with twice the pace that they can write them, perhaps ere long they will be able to put their works in type without so much as taking the trouble to compose them. A thought-hatching easy chair may very likely be invented, by the help of which an author may sit down at his ease before his thought-printing piano, and play away ad libitum whatever may occur to him. Different cushions may be used for different kinds of composition, some stuffed with serious thoughts, fit for sermons or reviews, and others with light fancies, fit for works of fiction, poetry, or fun. By a judicious choice of cushions an author will be able to sit down to his piano, and play a novel in three volumes twice or thrice a week, besides knocking off a leader every morning for a newspaper, and issuing every fortnight a bulky epic poem, or a whole encyclopædia complete within a month.

 

On the whole, this is not a bad though fantastic summary of the possibilities of a machine which, whatever its influence on the manufacture of novels, the multiplication of unnecessary books, and the art of letter-writing, has at least proved a wonderful time-saver and revolutionized the prospects of the "superfluous woman." In spite of its terrible ticking, it has proved a great lubricator of life; and, à propos of lubricants, we have to note the advent in the early 'seventies of synthetic butter, under its modern name: —

There are probably very few members of that generally bread-and-butter-eating community, the British Public, who have not frequently partaken, without knowing it, of the article described in the following extract from a letter of the Morning Post's Correspondent at Paris: —

"Butter, like all alimentary substances, has vastly increased in price. An enterprising merchant exhibits what he calls 'Produit nouveau, Margarine Mouriès, remplaçant le beurre pour la cuisine. Economie incontestable sur le beurre; il coûte moitié moins cher, et on en use moitié moins.' This butter is made from the fat of beef, and costs 10d. per pound."

In merry England, however, this article does not merely replace Butter for the kitchen, but also for the breakfast-parlour, where it is eaten, not under the name of Margarine, in bread-and-margarine, but that of Butter, in bread-and-butter. It is bought for Butter, and it is sold for Butter; only the buyer believes it to be what it is sold for, whereas the seller well knows that it is a product of beef-suet; and he serves his customer with the latter commodity at the price of the former. The "enterprising merchant" of Paris, who sells Margarine as a substitute for Butter, and does not sell his customers by selling it as Butter, and at Butter's value, has very likely found honesty to be the best policy. That policy might, perhaps, be adopted with advantage by an enterprising British Cheesemonger.

Beef-fat is, we fear, a euphemism for the principal ingredient in the synthesis of margarine as originally compounded, and it was a consciousness of this fact that more than anything else prompted the dishonesty of the British cheesemonger.

The list of useful novelties may be completed with postcards, which date from the year 1870. Punch recognized their drawbacks, and recommended people who used them to write in cypher or in Greek characters, which was less a counsel of perfection fifty years ago than it would be to-day.

England's debt to America in the domain of invention was not confined to mechanical labour-saving appliances. The inventiveness of the American journalist repeatedly extorts the reluctant admiration of Punch from 1857 onwards. In the summer of 1858 he culls a gorgeous example of the high art of sensational reporting from a New York paper in which it was stated that six people were butchered by a man who blew his brains out, yet "at the latest date all the sufferers were in a fair way of recovery." Yet in their own way the English penny-a-liners were capable of fine work. In December of the same year Punch quotes the following from the account of an agricultural show in a daily paper: —

"Yesterday the gold medal pen of pigs was denuded of one of its finest specimens, one of those most extraordinary animals having expired from its obesity during the previous night. There were other demises from apoplexy amongst the porcine confraternity during the show."

The Press Surpasses Itself

It was in the Victorian age, again – though unknown to Punch– that the reporter of an Irish paper concluded his description of a burglary with the words, "after a fruitless search, all the money was recovered except one pair of boots." But the supremacy of the New World in this field was conclusively established in the year 1869, the annus mirabilis for ever memorable by its association with the greatest of all American advertisements. Fragments of this classic are familiar even to the present generation, but we are, thanks to Punch, able to give the original text in its entirety: —

Among those of our institutions that are especially getting Americanized is a part of our Press, professing to afford us information which it calls "reliable" and also abounding in announcements on which we may rely if their phraseology strikes us as the language of truth and honesty. Some of these notifications are formed on models, whereof a contemporary quotes an example: —

"A wonderful Medicine. The following advertisement is from a recent issue of a New York paper: – 'If you want a really pure unsophisticated "family pill," buy Dr. R – 's liver-encouraging, kidney-persuading, silent perambulator – twenty-seven in a box. This pill is as mild as a pet-lamb, and as searching as a small tooth-comb. It don't go fooling about, but strictly attends to business, and is as certain as an alarm clock.'"

Puffery, resembling, if not quite equalling, that above instanced, in wit and humour, is fast gaining ground among us. America has taught us how to advertise. Thank Barnum. We have been, and are continuing to be, Americanized. We are progressing.

Angelina Squills (the doctor's daughter) by a judicious use of her father's stethoscope, is able to detect and enjoy the delicate tenor voice of the interesting young curate who lodges next door.

One is glad that Punch recognized the "wit and humour" of this unique document, though he says nothing of its magical choice of words. Dr. R – was Dr. Rumbold. But whether or no he composed the advertisement I have not been able to discover – or, indeed, anything about him. Perhaps it was his swan-song; like the Old Masters, who according to Artemus Ward executed the execrable paintings exhibited at his lecture as their crowning and final achievement: "they did them and then they died."

The Next Generation

Sufficient materials have already been accumulated to enable the reader to form an estimate of Punch's credentials as a prophet or "intelligent anticipator." They would not, however, be complete without the "Forecast of the Next Generation" which appeared in 1872, and which is interesting not so much from its prophecies as from its comprehensive catalogue of Victorian shortcomings, failings and abuses: —

The next generation will possess an army properly clothed.

The next generation will all be able to read and write.

The next generation will wear light clothes in summer.

The next generation will remove some of the public-statues and edifices which their predecessors have erected.

The next generation will find life supportable without so many Vestries.

The next generation will not make calls.

The next generation will ride to and fro in decent cabs.

The next generation will have other sorts of fish in daily consumption besides red herrings.

The next generation will speak French and German, and, possibly, know something of their own language and literature.

The next generation will not wear high black hats in the month of July.

The next generation will see the officers of the army walking about the streets in uniform.

The next generation will have other public places of amusement open to them on Sundays, besides public-houses.

The next generation will be better cooks.

The next generation will have no theatres with fees.

The next generation will leave the table with the ladies.

The next generation will not avoid Hotels.

The next generation will find they can get on pretty comfortably without the Lord Privy Seal, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Judge Advocate General, etc.

The next generation will not be ashamed of Leicester Square.

The next generation will be able to cross the Channel with less bodily discomfort.

The next generation will journey by railway more safely and more punctually.

The next generation will still have the National Debt, duns, dentists, domestics, humbugs, quacks, impostors, absurd fashions, adulteration, swindlers, and the Income Tax.