The solution of the matter by Press censorship, advocated by the writer, presented difficulties which Punch did not shirk, and his own views, though strong, are tempered by sound common sense: —

Ainsworth's story may serve the turn of an Opéra-bouffe Librettist, and the scamp himself be played by a sprightly actress without much harm being done to anybody. Jack Sheppard, for instance, ought not to be sanctioned by the Licenser any more than Claude Duval, Dick Turpin, or any other drama of a like kind, of which the recognized motive is the veiled incentive to crime. Still, a raid on Harrison Ainsworth, notwithstanding the acknowledged mischief that has been done to the young and ignorant by a perusal of his cracksman's romance, would scarcely be the same thing, and yet the cases are sufficiently parallel to admit at least of argument. We should be inclined to suppress such romances as Jack Sheppard, Rookwood, Bulwer's Claude Duval, and also Eugene Aram, which was so severely and so justly satirized by Thackeray in Mr. Punch's pages. For the truth about Jack Sheppard our readers have only to refer to one of the earliest volumes of Mr. Punch's series, where they will find his character as described by Ainsworth, and his true character as given in the Newgate Calendar, displayed side by side in parallel columns. There was no sort of romance about the real Jack Sheppard.

Meantime, for want of a better remedy to meet the evil, let parents and guardians, and those who have charge and direction of the young idea, keep their eyes open and have a special regard to the direction in which it shows inclination to shoot. It is just as ready to derive its nutriment from the "penny healthful," as from the "penny dreadful," and as a mere matter of commercial enterprise, the former could be as easily forthcoming and available as the latter. Philanthropy is continually actively busying itself about the education of the young – here is something practical for it to do – let it look to the quality of its Magazine literature. It wants some energy and some capital, but both in these days ought to be forthcoming. To drive the penny dreadful out of the literary field is not a task beyond the powers of organization and enterprise. And it is in this direction that the first steps will be taken in the material and moral amelioration of "What boys read."

The subject recurs in 1889 and 1890, when sensational juvenile literature is again denounced; but the new stories are more vigorously condemned than the old, and the Ghost of Jack Sheppard, in a conversation with the Shade of Dick Turpin, scouts the notion that they could upset the minds of the young. Why, they weren't in it with the papers read by everyone everywhere! Punch vigorously supported the efforts of those who sought to abate the evils of child insurance, and welcomed the intervention of Magee, then Archbishop of York, who died while on a visit to London to attend a Committee of the House of Lords on his Infant Insurance Bill, in May, 1891. But when the Prevention of Cruelty Bill was in Committee in the summer of 1887, Punch strongly supported the Attorney-General's amendment to omit from the Bill the words prohibiting the employment of children under ten in theatres and licensed places of public entertainment. Mr. Mundella, who was in charge of the Bill, accepted the amendment, but "Dick Temple, Sam Smith and other superlatively good people objected," and it was defeated both in the Committee and the Report stages, to Punch's undisguised annoyance. After the Bill became law in July, he added "one word more," and his arguments, if not convincing, are at least consistent with his life-long sympathy with the professional actor: —

The Stage and Education

Well-intentioned persons do a heap of mischief, and talk and write a lot of nonsense about what they don't understand. There are dangers to morality ("who deniges of it?") in the Theatrical Profession, as in every other profession; but these affect the amateur, and those who go on the stage late in life, not those who are to the manner born. The loves of poor, honest, hard-working theatrical families, where the sons and daughters obtain theatrical employment at an early age, are thoroughly respectable. Their stage-work is not only compatible with their receiving a sound education, but is a complement of it. Habits of strict discipline, cleanliness, and domestic thrift are inculcated; the little children, from the biggest down to "the Widow's Mites" engaged in a Pantomime, are seldom sick, and never sorry, but do their work with pleasure, and would probably be willing to undertake even "more study," rather than be deprived of their theatrical employment which brings in the money, pays the school, and helps to keep a happy family together under one roof, which, "be it never so 'umble," is styled by that dear old English word "home" – and there is no place like it. The efforts of those who would exclude children under ten from theatrical work may cause great misery and break up many such happy homes. We say this in serious earnest, and, from practical experience, we do know what we are talking about.

Punch resented pedantic, official, or fussy interference with children whether at work or play. A Children's Party at the Mansion House in January, 1881, provokes well-merited ridicule. No mixed dancing was allowed; the only diversion was provided by some "hideous negro entertainers" and, by way of compensation, a sermon by Mr. Spurgeon! After 11.30 p. m. young ladies were allowed to dance, but only with young ladies; and the young gentlemen with young gentlemen. At the same time Punch was a believer in the cane, when administered with discretion, and a resolute discourager of precocity. The full-page illustration in the Almanack of 1884, "Education's Frankenstein," representing the omniscient child of the future, ruining all professions, as everyone can do everything, is an extravagant burlesque, but it foreshadows the complaints we have had of late of the "unfair competition" of the infant author and artist with the adult practitioner. In 1885 Du Maurier's Child of the Period gravely rebukes her grandmother who speaks of a "puff-puff" – "The locomotive, I suppose you mean, grandmamma." But this is a form of joke which recurs throughout the ages.

Punch's "Winter Exhibition of the Works of Young Masters" in 1888 is a really illuminating piece of prophetic satire. The exhibitors are all children, and the works shown all belong to the Nursery Period. We may take one example: —

Billy Bolaine, born 1868, flourished 1880-2. No. 3. Landscape, with horse, ducks and figures. Silvery effect of about eight o'clock in the morning anywhere. The animals have given rise to some discussion, but the general impression seems to be that the artist, who never depicted anything without a subtle meaning, originally intended at least one of them for a cow.

Altogether this is an excellent skit on the critics who greet all the efforts of the young with a foolish voice of praise. Self-conscious, aggressive and complacent precocity Punch could not endure; the small American child who treats a bishop, who had endeavoured to repress him, as a back number, is clearly regarded as a nuisance. But in his plea for the unhappy infant prodigy Punch recognized it as a real grievance that child performers were overworked by over-practising and continual travelling. In 1888 it was borne in upon him that, whether from the engrossing nature of modern girls' and boys' occupations, or their preference for contemporary and realistic fiction, the study of Fairy Tales and Nursery Lore was fast falling into neglect if not into positive contempt. To avert what he considered a national calamity, he felt it his duty to suggest to parents that no child should be allowed on any pretext in future to leave the Nursery for School until it had passed an examination in these subjects.

Fairy Tale Test Papers

Punch's test papers are all excellent, but I can only find room for the General and the Pantomime Papers: —

CRITICAL AND GENERAL

1. What is your opinion of the intelligence of Giants as a race? Of what substance were they in the habit of making their bread? Would you draw any and what distinction between (a) Giants and Giantesses, (b) Ogres and Ogresses, (c) a Mamma Ogress and her daughters?

2. What is a Roc? What do Rocs feed on? If you were on the edge of steep cliffs surrounding an inaccessible valley, strewn with diamonds and visited by Rocs – how would you proceed in order to obtain some of those diamonds? Give the reply of the Slave of the Lamp to Aladdin's request that a Roc's egg should be hung up in his dome.

3. Mention instances when (a) a Wolf, (b) a Bear, (c) a Cat, (d) a Harp, are recorded to have spoken, and give the substance of their remarks, when possible, in each case.

4. Write down the name of any hero you can remember who suffered inconvenience from (a) the imprudence, (b) the disobedience, of his wife.

5. How would you act if you were invited to go to a party on the opposite side of the way, and had nothing to go in but a pair of Seven-Leagued Boots? Compare the drawbacks and advantages of going to a State Ball in glass slippers.

6. State which family you would rather belong to: One in which there was (i.) a Wicked Uncle, (ii.) an Envious Sister, (iii.) a Jealous Brother, or (iv.) a Cruel Stepmother? Give your reasons, and illustrate them by examples. How many Wicked Uncles do you remember to have read of? Are Wicked Uncles ever sorry, and, if so, when?

7. Give any instances that occur to you where it is stated that the chief personages of the story "all lived happily ever afterwards." Are there any exceptions to this rule?

PANTOMIME PAPER

(Optional, and for those Students only who may decide to "take up" this branch of the subject.)

1. Did the manners, language, and general deportment of the various Kings and Queens you have seen in Pantomimes correspond at all with what you had expected them to be from the books?

2. Mention any fairy tale in which (1) long ballets, (2) allusions to subjects in last year's papers, (3) jokes about "drinks" and "pawn-tickets," (4) comic duets which you didn't quite understand, and (5) men dressed up in women's clothes, occur. Mention (if you can) any Pantomime in which they do not.

3. Were you surprised to hear at Drury Lane that the King who befriended the Marquis of Carabas was originally a Potman? Do you remember this in the original text?

4. Why do you suppose that the Wicked Brothers in this year's Pantomime were frightened by green snakes, pink lizards, and enormous frogs? Did their own explanation that they had "the jumps" convey much to your mind? Did this scene make you laugh?

5. Give as clear and intelligible an account as you are able of the story of any one Pantomime you have been to, mentioning where – if at all – it departed from the version you have studied, and whether or not you considered such departures (if any) to be improvements.

6. Investigate the principal peculiarities of Pantomime Animals. How do they chiefly differ from other animals? Describe the effect of kindness upon a Pantomime Donkey, and account for it.

N.B. – Not more than four questions need be attempted in each of the above papers. Candidates are advised not to leave any question unattempted from a mere inability to answer every part of such question.

The Pantomime Paper conveys some excellent dramatic criticism, which is needed as much to-day as thirty years ago, but it may be permitted to stand in this educational context. As a counterblast to the charge of indifference towards fairy tales on the part of the modern child, it is only right to add that in 1892 Du Maurier's picture, "A Warning," shows a touching belief in the actuality of Bluebeard: —

Archie (to his Sister, who has been reading him Fairy Tales): "Won't there be a lot of Us, if none of us go and get married? Worse than Hop-o'-my-Thumb!"

Sister: "Yes; but you know I mean to be married!"

Archie: "Do you mean to say you'd go and live alone with a Man after reading Bluebeard?"

When we turn to the Public and Preparatory Schools we find that Punch's criticisms resolve themselves into a triple indictment of their costliness, their curriculum and their undue exaltation of athletics. The attack on the athletic craze begins in 1875, when Punch published an imaginary Report of a boy's work for 1895 at St. Paul's, Eastminster, which deals with nothing but his progress at games and sports.

The Fetish of Games

The charge had a good deal to justify it, but the choice of a name was not happy, since Colet's famous foundation has in its recent phase never invited criticism on the score of any slackness in studious industry. Punch renews the attack more than once. In 1880, in a burlesque account of a Prize Day, brain-work is just tolerated; athletic prowess is the only thing really encouraged and rewarded. Yet simultaneously we encounter Master Freddy from Eton, who considers that energy of any sort is "bad form." "Good form," in Punch's view, might easily degenerate into a snobbish fetish, and in one of his "International Comparisons," in the Almanack of 1879, he emphasizes the comprehensiveness of French public schools as contrasted with the class distinctions observed in England. It was in the same year that an inquiry was held into the administration of Wellington College and the alleged departure from the intentions of the founders. Punch took the line that what was meant to be a military orphanage had become a rather costly public school of the common type, and noted that Mr. Gladstone defended the change because Benson, his son-in-law, was head master. This was a partial error. Gladstone's son-in-law was Wickham, who had succeeded Benson as head master. But the sting remained. Punch, it may be added, was thoroughly consistent in his attitude of antagonism to the diversion of old foundations from their original aims.

"Of course you needn't Work, Fitzmilksoppe; but Play you must and shall."

The costly inefficiency of the public schools came up again in 1880, à propos of a correspondence in The Times, in which a "disappointed mother" recounted the experience of her two sons who, on leaving a public school at the age of nineteen, had forgotten all they knew before they went there: —

Hence a justly "Disappointed Mother" naturally enough concludes that "Our great schools want inspection sadly." Experience has certainly given her some cause to compare them unfavourably with private schools; although as to the latter she generalizes rather widely in saying that they "must teach, or close." Too many of them do neither.

Her boys, at any rate, both of them learned at a Private Boarding School enough to enable them to pass the Junior Oxford Local Examination at an early age. Unquestionably they were taught so much; but then how were they taught it? In such a style that they have now, at an adult age, to be taught it over again.

So it seems that a "Disappointed Mother's" two sons were educated at the Private Boarding School as the bottles are aërated in a soda-water manufactory. Information must have been forced into the former as carbonic acid gas is pumped into the latter. The gas is retained in the bottles whilst corked down, but escapes on the removal of pressure; so, if the boyish minds are left open, their school-learning, set free from forcible compression, goes off in youthful effervescence. Admirable system, by which our youth at an early age are enabled to pass the examinations, for which at maturer years they have to be crammed all over again!

Classics v. Commerce

The inspection of public schools has remained a subject of acute controversy ever since; and it is not clear whether Punch's approval would have extended to Government inspection. It was in the same year, by the way, that Du Maurier illustrated the dialogue between Sir Gorgius Midas and an aristocratic Colonel. Sir Gorgius's main regret was that he had never been at a public school; the Colonel, who was once at Eton, laments that he suffers from a neglected education. Burnand, who succeeded to the editorship of Punch in 1880, was also an old Etonian, but was not on that account prepared to grant his old school a complete immunity from criticism. The "Diary of a Present Etonian," which appeared in 1885, is in the main jocularly descriptive, but illustrates a prevalent Philistinism, the habits of ragging and borrowing money, and tells of a week with only one whole school-day and two whole holidays. Yet while fully alive to the waste of time and money which went on at the public schools, Punch was very far from embracing the creed of the revolutionary utilitarians who would scrap the old curriculum wholesale. In 1887 he printed an ironic account of the "Public School of the Future," thoroughly impregnated with the Commercial Spirit. The hero, the new "Tom Brown," develops a talent for finance so remarkable that his father longs to see him loose on the Stock Exchange.

Punch did not believe in compulsory classics, because he disliked dons, pedants and academics; but in his parody of "The Isles of Greece" from the point of view of a British schoolboy, he made it abundantly clear that he had no love of the purely commercial "bread-study" view of Education: —

Oh feed me not on mythic lore,
But Science and the Modern Fact;
Teach me Electric Fires to store,
The difference 'twixt "Bill" and "Act."
Why should a Cockney care a "cuss"
For Homer or for Æschylus?

For who are they? But what art thou,
My Country? On thy fertile shore
The heroic lyre is tuneless now;
To scheme for dividends, dig for ore,
These are the things we hold divine,
Not Homer's long-resounding line.

In dealing with University Education Punch maintained his attitude of a moderate reformer. Keble College, Oxford, dates from 1870; in 1878 Punch twice over displays a keen hostility to the Anglican spirit of its founders and the "gingerbread and gilt" of Butterfield's architecture. He seizes the occasion to belittle Keble's poetry, to attack Pusey, Burgon and Liddon, and to describe the college in the following contemptuous quatrain: —

Half withdrawn in ways ascetic,
Half with modern notions stirring;
Half athletic, half æsthetic,
Neither fish, flesh nor red herring.

Punch did not share the late Canon Liddon's pessimism over the new Science degree at Oxford in 1879. Liddon is quoted as saying that without the habits of exactness and precision acquired by classical studies it was impossible to reach the higher characteristics of an educated man. The argument was naturally resented by those who maintained that "exactness and precision" were precisely the qualities inculcated by scientific training, and in an ironical dialogue Punch derides specialization as compared with the "humanities." In 1885 the neglect of English literature at the older Universities is satirized in the picture of the undergraduate reading out his illiterate letter, in which the first and third persons are hopelessly mixed up.

In 1886 the spread of free education to the Universities is foreshadowed in a description of the Slade Professor at Oxford lecturing to a mixed audience of coal-heavers and undergraduates; and the "Progressists' Calendar" indicates a revolt of Ratepayers against their new burdens. In the same year the "Studies from Punch's Studio" include a portrait of the new type of University don. "Wyckham of Jude's," who displays much versatile energy and a wide range of interests – athletics, music, philosophy, Browning and psychical research – ultimately goes to Australia as a Professor of Greek. The reference to "Eleutheria Hall" foreshadows Ruskin College, which was founded in 1899, and in other ways Punch's fancy portraiture illustrates the changes which had come over the spirit of Oxford's dream. We note, for example, the allusion to the new cosmopolitanism – the invasion of foreigners, white and coloured, anticipating the time some thirty years later which gave birth to one of the best of modern Oxford anecdotes. A film was being exhibited showing a large canoe manned by Hawaiian natives, whereon a voice arose from the audience, "Well rowed, Balliol!"

The Value of Modern Languages

The proposal, since realized, to introduce Agriculture as a subject for study at Oxford is jocularly treated early in 1887 in the form of a diary of a candidate who is ploughed for his unorthodox views on potato culture. As for modern languages, the advantages of a foreign education – social and artistic as well as commercial – are excellently summed up in the same year in Du Maurier's picture of the industrious and accomplished young man from Hamburg, who is not only a skilled pianist but can speak six languages, live on a pound a week, work eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and do without a holiday!

Young Müller (from Hamburg) accompanies the Miss Goldmores in some of Rubinstein's lovely duets – to the envy and disgust of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. (N.B. – Young Müller can also speak six languages, live on a pound a week, work eighteen hours out of twenty-four, and do without a holiday.)

In 1875 Punch dwelt sympathetically on the still surviving prevalence of classical learning amongst statesmen. The occasion was furnished by Disraeli's florid eulogy of the imagination of the English School of Art at the Royal Academy banquet: —

"HE TOO WAS BORN IN ARCADIA"

(Matthew Arnold on Disraeli at the R.A. Dinner)

Born in Arcadia! Ay, he knew
Pan's cloven foot-print on the dew,
And heard, the mystic woods across,
Aigipodē, Philokrotos,
"The bright-haired god of pastoral,"⁴
With pipings to his wood-nymphs call.
Yes, but a nobler sound there came —
The clarion of imperial Fame,
By which our greatest are withdrawn
From the serene Arcadian lawn.

Derby and Gladstone felt the breeze
That urged their sails to Homer's seas;
Yet in the Senate found their fate,
And drank the hot wine of debate.
Perish the thought that England's realm
Should e'er have dullards at the helm!
Far from us be the stolid serf
Who ne'er has trod Arcadian turf,
Nor heard, amid the glimmering trees,
Pan's happy Orestiades.

Probably the exigencies of the metre are responsible for the strange lapse which made Punch substitute "Orestiades" for "Oreades." Greek was not then in the "last ditch," though the following advertisement, which Punch reproduces in the same year, seems to show that its study did not conduce to opulence: —

A Bachelor, elderly and somewhat infirm, having a moderate acquaintance with the Latin and Greek languages and who is likewise expert with a weeding hoe, seeks a Home and Employment. A bracing air and easy access to the services of the Church indispensable. – Address, &c.

Nowadays one of our leading literary weeklies talks of the "Hyperion Spring." But as early as 1891 the question of Compulsory Greek was attracting a good deal of attention, and Punch sided with The Times in expressing his disbelief in "protected studies." He also took occasion to criticize the narrowness of the old curriculum in his picture deriding the ignorance of Dante shown by classical students. It is just as well that he heads the picture "Too much Greek," for no good Virgilian would ever have laid himself open to such a charge.

Too Much Greek

First Classic: "By the way, hadn't Dante got another Name?"

Second Classic: "Yes; Alfieri, I think – or else Alighieri."

First Classic: "Ah, perhaps you're right. I had a notion it was Gabriel Rossetti, or something!"

At the beginning of this period Punch undoubtedly showed a good deal of mistrust of the new methods of elementary education, in so far as they encouraged literary aspirations among the masses and tended to convert the artisan into the clerk. At its close he strikes a different and decidedly more democratic note in his ironical proposed "inscription for a Free Public Library" under the heading, "Laissez Faire": —

Here is an Institution doomed to scare
The furious devotees of Laissez Faire.
What mental shock, indeed, could prove immenser
To Mumbo Jumbo – or to Herbert Spencer?
Free Books? Reading provided from the Rates?
Oh, that means Freedom's ruin, and the State's!
Self-help's all right – e'en if you rob a brother —
But human creatures must not help each other!
The "Self-made Man," whom Samuel Smiles so praises,
Who on his fellows' necks his footing raises,
The systematic "Sweater," who sucks wealth
From toiling crowds by cunning and by stealth —
He is all right, he has no maudlin twist,
He does not shock the Individualist!
But rate yourselves to give the poor free reading?
The Pelican to warm her nestlings bleeding,
Was no such monument of feeble folly.
Let folks alone, and all will then be jolly.
Let the poor perish, let the ignorant sink,
The tempted tumble, and the drunkard drink!
Let – no, don't let the low-born robber rob,
Because – well, that would rather spoil the job.
If footpad-freedom brooked no interference,
Of Capital there might be a great clearance;
But, Wealth well-guarded, let all else alone,
'Tis thus our race hath to true manhood grown:
To make the general good the common care,
Breaks through the sacred law of Laissez Faire!

Laissez Faire in the family circle was another matter. The authority of the father in domestic affairs is represented as still unquestioned even by the mother as late as 1879. But, just as you can always find proverbs which are mutually contradictory the one of the other, so the pages of Punch constantly provide simultaneous illustrations of opposing tendencies. In the very same year in which the doctrine of patriarchal rule is shown to be still firmly established, Punch exhibits a highly modern aspect of the relations between the two generations. Squire Quiverfull's son, who pays 60s. a hundred for his cigars, rebukes his father for paying 3d. each for his: "If I had as many children to provide for as you, I wouldn't smoke at all."

4. Chapman: Homeric Hymns.