One of his literary contributors was his
successor
as
## p.
## p.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v14
.
.
and as a description of the sports and amuse-
ments of London in the ancient times, more curious than amusing.
6
Thackeray, therefore, nowhere has a good word to say for anything
about Life in London except the pictures. “More curious than
amusing' is a just criticism. The work is curious, partly for the
details that it furnishes of London life in a period when manners
were very pompous or very vulgar; and partly for its wealth in
the slang of the time. Egan was a master of the 'flash' and the
flashy; and Life in London contains as many slang phrases as he
could put into it. Two years later, he was to furnish the slang
phrases to Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
(1823); and one of his two illustrators, George Cruikshank, had
already drawn a plate for Andrewes's Dictionary of the Slang
and Cant Languages (1809).
Part of the success enjoyed by the work was due, no doubt,
to its readers' belief that they could name the originals of the
fictitious characters. Imitations came swift and frequent. In the
summer of 1822 plays founded upon the story were being acted at
no less than ten theatres in and about London ; and among the
adapters were Charles Dibdin, whose version was played at the
Olympic, and W. T. Moncrieff, whose play ran for more than 300
nights at the Adelphi theatre. It was Moncrieff who, in answer
to the accusation that Egan and he had made their age the age of
flash, replied in the wellknown but inconclusive saying, 'Any age
is better than the age of cant'-cant implying, of course, the pro-
,
tests of certain portions of the press and of some religious bodies.
Egan himself produced, in 1822, a dramatic version of the story,
which was played without success (save for a pony-race round the
theatre) at Astley's. The book was, also, translated into French.
Out of the sixty-five imitations of it which Egan stated that he had
## p. 225 (#255) ############################################
vi]
The English Spy
225
reckoned, the most important was Real Life in London, or, the
Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq. and his cousin,
the Hon. Tom Dashall, through the Metropolis ; exhibiting a
living picture of fashionable characters, manners, and amuse-
ments in high and low life, which was published in sixpenny
numbers in 1821, with excellent illustrations by Heath, Alken,
Dighton, Rowlandson and others. Real Life in London is a
pleasanter book than its prototype. Some have held that Egan
wrote it; but the author had a purer style, a cleaner mind
and a wider knowledge of London than Egan. The book shows
many more sides of London life than his; though the formal
descriptions of wellknown scenes or buildings, here and there
inserted amid matter of a very different character, recall very
forcibly Mr Bouncer's letters to his aunt in Verdant Green.
Another imitation was Life in Paris: The Rambles of Dick
Wildfire (1821), written, it is suspected, by David Carey, and
illustrated by George Cruikshank, who had never been to Paris,
but was accustomed to drawing his own idea of French people in
his caricatures, and took his scenes from the drawings and paintings
of other artists. An offshoot of Life in London was The
English Spy: An Original Work, Characteristic, Satirical, and
Humorous, illustrated with many coloured plates, of which the
greater number are by ‘Robert Transit' (i. e. Robert Cruikshank),
at least one (not in his pleasantest vein) by Rowlandson and a
few by other hands, and written by 'Bernard Blackmantle,' a
pseudonym for Charles Molloy Westmacott. Westmacott, whose
Points of Misery (1823) was illustrated by George Cruikshank,
appears to have been a blackmailer ; but he was a spirited and
amusing writer, and, though The English Spy, both in text and
in illustrations, is sometimes as coarse as ever was Smollett in
word or Gillray in drawing, it contains many lively representations
of life, high and low, gives much curious information about the
customs and manners of the day and about real people still
recognisable under their fictitious names, and preserves many tales
of a past age. It attempts to do for many places in England
what Life in London and Real Life in London had done for
the metropolis. Eton and Westminster schools, the university
of Oxford, Brighton, Bath and Cheltenham, London and the
suburbs of London, Cowes, Portsmouth and Doncaster races, all
find a place in Westmacott's racy pages; and Robert Cruikshank's
plates are as full of vigour and variety as the author's prose and
In or about 1823, a young artist, named Theodore Lane,
15
6
verse.
E. L. XIV.
CH, VỊ.
## p. 226 (#256) ############################################
226
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
brought to Pierce Egan a series of original and effective designs
representing the life of an actor from his stage-struck days to his
triumph; and round them Egan wrote The Life of an Actor,
which was published in 1824. Though it suffers from all the
faults of Egan's flashy style, the book is well designed and inte-
resting, while the footnotes are full of theatrical stories of various
merit. It was Lane, also, who illustrated Egan's Anecdotes,
Original and Selected, of the Turf, the Chase, the Ring, and the
Stage, published in 1827. In the following year, Egan brought
out The Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry, and Logic,
in their Pursuits through Life In and Out of London, with
illustrations by Robert Cruikshank. To some extent, the work
was intended as a sop to those who had attacked the im-
morality of Life in London. Logic dies, at which no one would
be surprised, though it is difficult not to resent the attempt to
make his end pathetic. Corinthian Tom, attempting a little
genuine sport, breaks his neck in the hunting-field ; his cast-off
mistress, Corinthian Kate, dies of drink and starvation, and
Jerry alone is left alive, to settle down in the country with a
virtuous wife. The illustrations are admirable; and the text is
more amusing, less vulgarly written and less offensive in subject
than that of Life in London. Among the books on life in London
during the end of the eighteenth and the early years of the nine-
teenth centuries, one other demands notice, A Book for a Rainy
Day, or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766—1833 by
John Thomas Smith. John Thomas Smith, who was born in a
hackney coach on the way from Earl street, Seven Dials, to Great
Portland street, on a June evening in 1766 and died in April
1833, was an artist, a writer and a Londoner, and wrote a life
of his father's master, the sculptor Nollekens, which is unmatched
for malicious candour and vivid detail. Art-student, portrait-
painter, sightseer, writer, gossip, and keeper of the prints in the
British museum, Smith spent his sixty-seven years in close touch
with the artistic and literary life of London. He had a keen
curiosity about things and people past and present, a retentive
memory and a gift for gossip; and his book is one of the most
entertaining and most trustworthy memorials of his period. Pub-
lished twelve years after his death, it forms a valuable corrective
to the flashy fictions of Egan and his like.
It is significant that, within twelve hours of the appearance of
Life in London, the title, the names and the story were seized
upon by James Catnach, who put forth, from his printing-house
## p. 227 (#257) ############################################
VI]
James Catnach
227
verses.
6
in Monmouth court, Seven Dials, a twopenny broadside, entitled
Life in London; or, the Sprees of Tom and Jerry; attempted in
cuts and verse, with twelve plates very roughly imitated from the
Cruikshanks. James Catnach had long been doing for the poor
what Egan attempted to do for the rich-provide them with
highly seasoned literature. The son of a north-country printer
who, at Alnwick, had issued volumes illustrated by the wood-
cuts of Bewick and Clennell, James Catnach set up as a printer
of popular literature in Seven Dials in the year 1813. He was
the most eminent and successful of his class, though the rivalry
of the older business of Pitts, in Great St Andrew street hard
by, was at first severe. In those days, when newspapers cost
7d. or 8}d. , and good cheap literature was all but unknown,
Catnach performed an important service for the working classes.
He printed and sold illustrated books for children, some at a
farthing, some at a halfpenny, some at a few pence; and very
good, in their way, they were, with their simple renderings of
famous fairy stories, their moral lessons and improving or amusing
He wrote, or procured for so much as 28. 6d. apiece from
the street poets, ballads on passing events—the battle of Waterloo,
the death of princess Charlotte, the attempt to rid Covent garden
theatre of what Tom and Jerry called 'gay Cyprians,' while
Tom Dashall and Bob Tallyho knew them as 'dashing. Catnach
sold history at one penny a sheet; he mourned the death of
Jack Randall, the eminent pugilist; he published very interesting
cuts of the cries of London ; he gave, from day to day, a vivid
and various picture of the life of his times; and in his broadsheets
and flysheets may be found the mind of the labouring and the
criminal classes of his period. To Catnach one may turn for
information about coaching, about omnibuses, about Sir Robert
Peel's new and derided police-about all the turbulent life of the
London streets. He dealt, also, largely in fiction disguised as
truth-much as a modern newspaper does. Part of the handsome
fortune that he made must have arisen from the dreadful scandals,
the duels between ladies of fashion, the elopements and so forth,
that he invented for the delectation of his readers' hearty appetites.
But chiefly he was known for his works on crime. Those were the
days of highwaymen; and about highwaymen, whom the educated
classes knew to be pitiful scoundrels, there is practically no con-
temporary literature except that of the kind published by Catnach
or Pitts. Those were the days of public executions, when not only
a gay demeanour but a confession and ‘last words' were expected
15-2
## p. 228 (#258) ############################################
228
Caricature and Sport [CH.
of the criminal. The ordinary of Newgate usually published a
paper; but his accounts were jejune, compared with those that
Catnach or Pitts could produce. There was a safe and brisk
.
market for 'Last Sorrowful Lamentations,' with portrait, con-
fession and a woeful ballad, all on one sheet. In the description
of murders Catnach excelled. On the occasion of the famous
'Red Barn' murder, in 1828, Catnach sold, it is said, more than
one million copies of the murderer Corder's confession and a
ballad. Previously, he had done very well with the yet more
famous murder of Weare by Thurtell, in 1823.
Catnach, however, did not enjoy the field of murder all to
himself. At this period, the interest in brutal crime and more
brutal punishment was, perhaps, even livelier in all classes than it
is today. On the Cato street conspiracy of 1820 The Observer
newspaper sailed to triumph. Clement, the proprietor, not only
gave pictures of the stable and hayloft in Cato street where
the conspirators were captured, but defied the law by publishing
a full account of the trial before the verdict was given. On the
occasion of the murder of Weare by Thurtell, he was yet more
lavish, and was, indeed, held to have overstepped the mark of
propriety. The objections, which were levelled chiefly at the
illustrations, may be held to have been captious, and even inspired,
to some extent, by the envy of less enterprising newspapers; for
these were days when no reputable journal was ashamed to
give great prominence to reports of crime: even The Annual
Register published the evidence and the verdict in important
cases. These were the days, too, when The Newgate Calendar
was brought out. The original series, The Newgate Calendar; or,
Malefactors' Bloody Register, published in or about 1774, con-
tained in its five volumes notorious crimes from 1700 to the date
of publication. Between 1824 and 1826, Andrew Knapp and
William Baldwin, attorneys-at-law, issued, in four volumes, The
Newgate Calendar, comprising interesting memoirs of the most
notorious characters; and, in or about 1826, they issued, in six
volumes, The New Newgate Calendar, which consisted of their
original series much enlarged and with the preface abbreviated.
The Calendar consists of the lives, crimes, trials and (where
inflicted) tortures and executions, of criminals of many kinds,
from miserable thieves or forgers to murderers, from murderers
to those accused of rebellion and high treason. It is, indeed,
as Sir Walter Scott's little friend, Marjory Fleming, said, 'a book
that contains all the Murders: all the Murders did I say, nay all
## p. 229 (#259) ############################################
vi]
The Newgate Calendar
229
6
Thefts and Forgeries that ever were committed. Of The Newgate
Calendar, there is no better critic than Marjory Fleming. "The
Newgate Calender,' she writes, “is very instructive [and] Amusing,
and shews us the nesesity of doing good and not evil. ' "The
history of all the Malcontents that ever was hanged is very
amusing,' she writes later ; but, at the same time, it 'fills me
with horror and consternation. The author of the very improving
preface to the first series could have said no more. Knapp and
Baldwin, in the preface to their earlier series, attempt to connect
their labours with the protest, then being raised, against the
severity of the English law; but Marjory Fleming goes to the
root of the matter. The Newgate Calendar stands at the head
of the English literature of crime. It was worth the while of
attorneys-at-law to do for the educated classes what Catnach and
others had long been doing for the poor; and The Newgate
Calendar was developed out of the sheets sold by hawkers at
public executions.
The success of Life in London was partly due, no doubt,
to Pierce Egan's great personal popularity ; he was known as
Glorious Pierce,' and the prince regent had commanded that
he should be presented at court. For Egan was the first great
sporting journalist, in days when journalism had discovered the
dignity and the beneficence of sport. To understand Egan's
eminence in this field, it is necessary to go back some years. The
eighteenth century—the century, in England, of reason and system-
systematised, to some extent, English sport. From the eighteenth
century, the then distinctively English sport of pugilism received
organisation and science. In the reign of George I, fighting with
fists had begun to take the place of the combats with sword
or cudgel. James Fig, 'the father of the ring,' who opened in
1719 the Academy in Tottenham-court road, where the famous
captain Godfrey and other athletes exhibited their skill, was
swordsman as well as boxer. It remained for Jack Broughton,
the champion from 1734 to 1750, to reduce boxing to an accurate
science; and Daniel Mendoza, champion from 1784 to 1820, intro-
duced 'a new, a more rapid, and more elegant style of boxing, and
a more artistic technique. By the close of the eighteenth century,
boxing had not only, like hunting, become systematised ; thanks
to the pleasure taken in the prize-ring by the prince of Wales and
his brothers, pugilism was the most fashionable of amusements
and of spectacles. The passion for this form of sport ran through
all classes, and was more ardent even than the modern passion for
## p. 230 (#260) ############################################
230
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
football. On the one hand, it may be remembered that the last
desire expressed before execution by Thurtell, the murderer of
Weare, was 'to read Pierce Egan's account of the great fight
yesterday. On the other hand, a man of intellect, like William
Hazlitt, was a genuine lover of sport, and would take infinite
trouble to see a prize-fight. In The New Monthly Magazine for
February 1822', Hazlitt describes how he travelled on a cold and
wet December night to Hungerford, and went bedless, in order to
see 'the Gas-man' (Thomas Hickman) fight Bill Neate. The paper
gives what is, perhaps, the most vivid description of a prize-fight
ever written. The reader may realise by its means all the details
of prize-fighting that to modern taste appear brutal and disgusting;
but he will be left in no doubt about the pluck and endurance
displayed by the fighters, and, in Hazlitt's comments upon
Hickman’s ‘vapouring and swaggering,' he will find an admirable
statement of the virtues of the true sportsman. Indeed, the
whole position of sport had changed. That athletic exercises
were considered worthy of serious attention, the great illustrated
work of the artist and antiquary, Joseph Strutt, The Sports
and Pastimes of the People of England from the earliest
period (first published in 1801) is a sign. And to pugilism, even
more than to hunting, the patriots of the day liked to point, as
both proving and developing those qualities—courage, endurance,
'bottom,' or unquenchable spirit—which were held to make the
true Briton the equal of any three or more Frenchmen. In the
rooms of John Jackson (Byron's tribute to Jackson as man and as
boxer will be remembered), Tom and Jerry were shown a picture
of an assassination in Rome, the victim having been stabbed with
a dagger; and Logic's comment was :
When comparisons are made, the above plate speaks volumes in favour
of the manly and generous mode resorted to by Englishmen to resent an
insult or to decide a quarrel.
Pugilism, though already subject to attack as brutal and ferocious,
had the great heart of the country behind it. In the service of
pugilism Egan made his fame. He was not, of course, the first
writer on boxing. Captain Godfrey brought out, in or about 1740,
a small Treatise on the Useful Art of Self-defence. Paul Whitehead
had sung of the art in The Gymnasiad (1757); John Byrom,
Robert Barclay and others, had celebrated it in prose or verse;
and the journals, including The Gentleman's Magazine, The Flying
1 Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Waller and Glover, vol. XII, p. 1.
## p. 231 (#261) ############################################
vi]
Literature of Pugilism
231
6
Post, The World and others, had published accounts of prize-
fights. But Egan was the first to make a name for himself as a
sporting journalist. Writing in a florid, slipshod style, by no
means devoid of vigour and vividness, he described the fights with
understanding and at the same time with what many of his readers
probably mistook for 'a literary touch'; and his example has not
yet completely faded from journalism. In 1824, he began editing
a weekly paper, Pierce Egan's Life in London and Sporting
Guide, which, later, developed into the more famous sporting
journal Bell's Life in London. Egan's Book of Sports and
Mirror of Life (1832) is a valuable compilation ; but his most
successful work on sport was his illustrated book, Boxiana; or,
Sketches of Antient and Modern Pugilism, from the days of the
renowned Broughton and Slack, to the championship of Crib.
The work was founded on an earlier work of the same title, pro-
duced by George Smeeton in 1812. The first two volumes of
Egan's book were issued in 1818; and a third in 1821. A new
series', in two volumes, was issued in 1828 and 1829. Here may
be read the lives and achievements of Fig, Broughton, Jackson,
Gulley, Mendoza, Molineaux, Tom Crib, Tom Spring, Jem Ward-
of all the great and lesser heroes of 'the fancy. ' Henry Downes
Miles, who, in 1906, published Pugilistica, the three volumes of
which carried the story of British boxing down to Sayers and Tom
King and the end of the prize-ring, frequently accuses Egan of
inaccuracy; but his book, for nearly a century, was the standard
history of the art, and, in his own day, was the classic work upon
the principal British sport. Among many other publications of
the time concerned with boxing, an honourable place is held by
the illustrated journal, The Fancy, which, between 1821 and 1826,
published memoirs of famous pugilists, accounts of fights, general
sporting intelligence and a few pages of miscellaneous news, all of
which are rich in information on the vigorous and not squeamish
sporting activities of the period.
Hunting, like pugilism, though in a less degree, was systematised
by the eighteenth century, and became a subject of popular, as
well as practical, literature. During the first half, or more, of the
century, every country gentleman hunted, but very many country
gentlemen kept their own packs, which were small and not choicely
bred. Few of them, probably, were maintained on even so steady,
if so nicely 'humorous' a principle as those musical fellows of
Coverly hall in Warwickshire. Squire Western's hounds have
· For bibliographical details, see Pugilistica, 1906, p. xi.
a
## p. 232 (#262) ############################################
232
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
not been closely described; but it is not unlikely that, in spite of
Gervase Markham's works, and Richard Blome's The Gentleman's
Recreation of 1683, and the amount of science displayed by
Somervile in The Chace, such hounds as those of lord Scattercash
were not so rare in the mid-eighteenth century as in the mid-
nineteenth. Then came a remarkable master of hounds-one
who, according to a writer commonly supposed to be Sir Egerton
Brydges, could ‘bag a fox in Greek, find a hare in Latin, inspect
his kennels in Italian, and direct the economy of his stables in
exquisite French'-a scholar and a sportsman, Peter Beckford.
Beckford, in 1781, published at Salisbury a quarto volume,
Thoughts upon Hare and Fox Hunting, which has been held
to 'mark an era not only in the literature but in the history of
hunting. This work, and the same author's Essays on Hunting,
laid the foundation of the art of hunting ; and Peter Beckford's
name has been held in veneration not only by 'Nimrod’ and
other writers on the sport, but by all serious students and
practitioners of the art. After Beckford, good books on hunting
became fairly numerous ; and among them should be mentioned
The British Sportsman by Samuel Howitt, a sportsman and
artist, who married a sister of Rowlandson and worked in close
contact with his brother-in-law. Hunting, coaching, and all
sports with horses offered an attractive field to the artists of
the day, as well as to the writers; and Bunbury proved to be the
ancestor of a long and numerous line, which includes George
Cruikshank, Leech, Robert Seymour and many other famous
names. Among the earliest successors of Bunbury is Henry
Alken, who did excellent sporting pictures between 1816 and
1831. A man of obscure origin (he is supposed to have been stud-
groom or trainer to the duke of Beaufort before he won fame as
an artist), Alken was commended by a writer (probably Christopher
North) in Blackwood's Magazine for his understanding of English
gentlemen—a subject in which George Cruikshank was held to
fail. In the great popularity of sport, Alken found ready employ-
ment as draughtsman. His National Sports of Great Britain
contains fifty admirable coloured engravings, in which his accurate
knowledge and his artistic sense are cleverly combined ; to The
Analysis of the Hunting Field, a volume of papers on the com-
ponents of a hunt reprinted from Bell's Life in London, he
contributed six of his finest designs; and his comic series,
Specimens of Riding, Symptoms of being amazed and others,
deserve the popularity they achieved. If Alken could draw like
1
## p. 233 (#263) ############################################
VI]
Literature of Hunting
233
a gentleman, he was soon to be associated with one who could
write like a gentleman. When Lockhart said of ‘Nimrod' that
he could 'hunt like Hugo Meynell and write like Walter Scott,' he
was doubtless excited into exaggeration by the pleasure of having
hit upon a man who could write of sport without the vulgarity
of Egan. “Nimrod,' whose name was Charles James Apperley
was a man of education, a country squire and a genuine sports-
man. Loss of means turned him to literature; he contributed
articles on sport to The Sporting Magazine, The Quarterly
Review and other journals; but is best known by his two books,
The Life of a Sportsman, and Memoirs of the Life of John
Mytton, both of which were illustrated with coloured engravings
by Alken. The Life of a Sportsman, published in 1842, con-
tains a very pleasant account of country life in days when sport
was no longer confused with debauchery; while its descriptions of
runs to hounds, its lore of hunting and of four-in-hand driving
and its variety of incident and anecdote make it still both valuable
and agreeable. Apperley, though not a Walter Scott, was a good
writer; he knew his subject thoroughly, on both the scientific
and the personal sides, and this work of fiction, though poor in
plot, is rich in interest. Memoirs of the life of John Mytton
appeared as a book in 1837, a portion of the work having been
printed in The New Sporting Magazine in 1835. It shows a
difficult task performed with fidelity and tact. Apperley had been
Mytton's neighbour in Shropshire, and had extended to him
all the care that was possible when both were living in Calais
in order to avoid their creditors. Apperley's task was to write
the life of a man who, while he was one of the most heroic
sportsmen that ever lived, was also drunken, diseased and insane;
and he performed the task with admirable judgment.
Before the death of Apperley, a new sporting writer, of a more
humorous turn, had begun a brilliant career. Like ‘Nimrod,'
,
Robert Smith Surtees was both sporting writer and sportsman.
The second son (and, in his fortieth year, the successor) of a
Yorkshire landowner, he contributed in youth to The Sporting
Magazine, and, in 1831, started, with Rudolf Ackermann the
younger, The New Sporting Magazine, which he edited till 1856.
Here first appeared the comic papers, which, in 1838, were published
in a book under the title of Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities,
with coloured plates by Alken. Lockhart shared the general
1 For the driving of stage-coaches, see Cross, Thomas, The Autobiography of a Stage
Coachman, 1861.
## p. 234 (#264) ############################################
234
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
a
admiration for these comic sketches of sporting life, and urged Sur-
tees to write a book. Surtees made further use of the conception
of Mr Jorrocks, the grocer of sporting tastes, and produced
Handley Cross, or the Spa Hunt, which was enlarged into
Handley Cross, or Mr Jorrocks' Hunt, with pictures by John
Leech. Then came Hawbuck Grange, illustrated by 'Phiz’
(Hablot Knight Browne); Ask Mamma, or The Richest Commoner
in England; Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour, illustrated by Leech;
and Mr Facey Romford's Hounds, illustrated by Leech and
Browne, besides other novels. Surtees was also the author of
the papers in Bell's Life in London, some of which were issued,
with illustrations by Alken, in a volume mentioned above, The
Analysis of the Hunting Field. It is possible that the true worth of
Surtees's work has been a little obscured by the fame of the author of
Pickwick, of which the original idea, a tale of cockney sporting life,
was to some extent suggested by the adventures of Mr Jorrocks.
Surtees is a comic writer of a broad and hearty humour and a
deft and subtle touch. In the invention of comic character and
speech, he comes second only to Dickens. Mr Jorrocks, ‘Facey'
Romford, lord Scamperdale and his friend Jack Spraggon,
Mr Sponge, Mr Jawleyford of Jawleyford court—these, with
nearly every character that Surtees troubles to elaborate, are rich
in humour; while the dialogue in these novels has a force and a
flavour comparable only with that in Dickens, or in some piece of
flourishing invective in Nashe or Greene. Surtees's comedy is,
doubtless, like that of Dickens, mainly a comedy of 'humours' or
personal oddities; and Surtees, it must be admitted, was careless
about construction and about such necessary ingredients of a novel
a
as did not interest him ; but all the fun is rooted in human nature,
and set out with abounding energy. Surtees was fortunate in the
assistance of two young artists who were then carrying on the
succession of Alken and George Cruikshank. Both John Leech
and H. K. Browne were keen sportsmen and good artists; and,
though Leech never learned to draw a horse, while Browne's horses
were as good as Alken’s, both men were comic draughtsmen of
inventiveness and humour. Browne found good material in the
novels of another sporting writer, Francis Edward Smedley, a
cripple with a taste for sporting literature. Smedley, who was for
three years editor of George Cruikshank's Magazine, wrote three
novels of high spirits and rapid comedy, Frank Fairleigh, Lewis
Arundel and Harry Coverdale's Courtship; of which the first is
still, and deservedly, popular.
## p. 235 (#265) ############################################
VI]
Punch
235
The illustrations to the books of which mention has been
made were etched and then coloured by hand. Meanwhile, the
art of wood-engraving, which had become degraded and neglected,
was revived about the close of the eighteenth century by Thomas
Bewick. Bewick and his pupils spread abroad the practice of the
art; and thus there came into being a means of illustration in
black and white very serviceable for the use of the periodical
press. Much as the vitality of pictorial art had helped to bring
into being the literature of the various kinds that have been
described above, so the existence of a number of able engravers
on wood helped to bring into being an illustrated press. In the
early years of the nineteenth century, The Observer, Bell's Life in
London and other papers owned by William Clement, had made a
special feature of their illustrations; and The Observer was quick
to take advantage of the revival in the art of wood-engraving.
At the same time, the refinement of taste and manners brought
the need of a comic journalism that should be free of scurrility
and other offence; and, before the middle of the nineteenth
century, the two influences had combined to produce the most
famous of comic journals, Punch. To the making of Punch and
its various component parts, several streams flowed. Some of
them have already been noticed in this chapter : the burlesque of
the illustrated tour; the illustrated comedy of sport; the political
or social caricature; the book of anecdote and jest. George
Cruikshank, who, in the art of comic draughtsmanship, marks
the transition from the brutality of Gillray or Rowlandson to the
delicate humour of du Maurier or Tenniel, issued, for some years
after 1835, a Comic Almanack, to which eminent authors, among
them Thackeray, contributed ; and Thomas Hood had founded
his famous Comic Annual in 1830. Account must, also, be taken
of certain comic journals that had preceded Punch, among them,
especially, the Figaro and the Charivari of Paris. The honour
of producing the first English comic journal comparable with
Punch belongs to Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, one of many lively
young humourists, the majority of whom became contributors to
the most successful of comic papers. À Beckett, who was a
barrister, and became a police magistrate, started, in 1813, an
illustrated comic journal entitled Figaro in London, which was
illustrated by Robert Seymour and, after him, by Robert Cruik-
shank. This journal à Beckett conducted for three years, and
among his many other ventures were The Wag and The Comic
Magazine.
One of his literary contributors was his successor as
## p. 236 (#266) ############################################
236
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
editor of Figaro, Henry Mayhew, and one of his artists William
Newman, who afterwards did valuable work for Punch. Punchi-
nello, illustrated by Robert Cruikshank, was another, and a short-
lived, predecessor of Punch. Douglas Jerrold's Punch in London
was yet another. In 1830 and onwards, a large amount of young
and eager comic talent, both in art and in literature, was finding
expression; and, in 1841, the best of it combined in the production
of the most respectable and most popular of comic journals. The
facts of the founding of Punch have been disputed. The authorised
view is that Ebenezer Landells, a newspaper projector, and a wood-
engraver who had learned his art from Bewick, had the idea of a
comic journal similar to the Paris Charivari-an idea that had
previously been all but brought to fruit by Douglas Jerrold,
Thackeray, Kenny Meadows, Leech and others. After suggesting
the idea to several publishers in vain, Landells took it to the
printer, Joseph Last, who entertained it favourably, and sent him
to see Henry Mayhew, the son of Last's legal adviser. Mayhew
took him on to see Mark Lemon, a publican turned dramatist,
and the list of the staff was thereupon drawn up. At the next
meeting, Mayhew, Lemon and Stirling Coyne were appointed
joint-editors; Archibald S. Henning, cartoonist; Brine, John
Phillips and William Newman artists in ordinary, and Lemon,
Coyne, Mayhew, Gilbert Abbott à Beckett and W. H. Wills (who
was subsequently secretary to Charles Dickens), the literary staff.
The first number, which appeared on 17 July 1841, contained con-
tributions, also, by Henry Grattan (whose full name was Henry
Grattan Plunkett, and whose pseudonym was ‘Fusbos '), Joseph
Allen, an artist, and F. G. Tomlins. Before the appearance of the
second number the staff had been joined by Douglas Jerrold.
Later additions to the list of contributors in the early days of the
journal's existence were Percival Leigh (whose pseudonym was
'Paul Prendergast'), the author of The Comic Latin Grammar,
a doctor by profession, and a scholarly and gentle-minded wit ;
Albert Smith, well known for his popular lectures on the ascent
of Mont Blanc; H. A. Kennedy; William Maginn; John Oxenford,
dramatic critic; Thackeray and Horace Mayhew, younger brother
of Henry Mayhew.
To the influence of Henry Mayhew has been ascribed the
geniality of tone which differentiated Punch from Charivari ;
but that geniality was tempered, in and after the second number,
by the work of the most remarkable among the early writers for
Spielmann, M. H. , The History of Punch, 1895, chap. I.
1
## p. 237 (#267) ############################################
vi]
Contributors to Punch
237
Punch. Douglas William Jerrold was a dramatist and wit who
had already made his mark with his play, Black-eyed Susan, and
his studies of Men of Character (1838), for which Thackeray
drew illustrations. His papers in Punch, signed 'Q;' the first,
of which appeared on 12 September 1841, were the contri-
butions that attracted attention to the paper; and Jerrold's
work, thenceforth, gave Punch its tone. Here appeared, in
1843, Punch's letters to his son; in 1845, Punch's Complete
Letter-writer; and Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures, which was
issued as a book in 1846. Jerrold wrote several other serial
works for Punch, yet none so popular as Mrs Caudle. This
series, more genially humorous and less satirical than most of
Jerrold's work, made the fortune of Punch. But, in the earlier
years of the paper, it was not Jerrold's comedy but his more
serious writing—the social and political articles signed 'Q'—that
gave the journal its character and distinction. Jerrold was a
man of hasty temper and caustic tongue, but of a warm heart
and of quick sympathy with the oppressed. In his political
philosophy, there may have been some traces of the school of
Godwin ; but his leading idea (or sentiment) was the wickedness
of the rich and the oppressed innocence of the poor. With
satire (sometimes personal) and invective, he fought hard and
fearlessly, if not always wisely, in a good cause; and he gave to
Punch its trend towards liberalism in politics. Thackeray began
his connection with Punch with Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on
English History, and drawings to illustrate, occasionally other
people’s, but usually his own, writings. In Punch, too, appeared
his Diary of Fitz-Jeames de la Pluche ; his Snobs of England,
and his Punch's Prize Novelists. His regular connection with
Punch practically ended in 1851, though his last contribution
to it was published in 1854. In Miss Tickletoby's Lectures
some have seen the germ of The Comic History of England
and The Comic History of Rome, written by Gilbert Abbott
à Beckett, and illustrated by John Leech. Besides these two
prolonged efforts of humour, which, considering the extent and
nature of the task, is wonderfully well maintained, à Beckett
wrote a brilliant piece of parody, The Comic Blackstone, illustrated
by George Cruikshank and John Leech, which, even more than the
Histories, has an instructive, as well as a comic, value, and has even
been recommended as a text-book of law. Some of à Beckett's best
work for Punch consisted of the articles on the trials of a young
barrister which were signed ‘Mr Briefless': a series which gave
## p. 238 (#268) ############################################
238
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
rise, many years later, to the letters of 'A. Briefless, Junior,'
contributed to Punch by Gilbert Abbott à Beckett's son, Arthur
William à Beckett, who, with his brother, Gilbert Arthur à Beckett,
was to join the staff of Punch in later years.
Thomas Hood' began to contribute to Punch in 1843, and
amused himself and his readers with his attacks on the plagiarist,
lord William Lennox, at whom Jerrold and other wits also
had their fling. Hood is best known, however, as a contributor
to Punch, by the famous Song of the Shirt, which appeared in
the Christmas number of the year 1843. The year 1844 increased
the number of contributors by Kenealy, J. W. Ferguson and
Tom Taylor, whose connection with the paper remained unbroken
till his death in 1880. Mark Lemon, into whose hands the sole
editorship of the paper soon passed, remained in control of it for
twenty-nine years : a wise and capable director of a journal which,
by means of the celebrated weekly dinners, has always been
conducted on the principle of co-operation and mutual criticism
among the members of the staff. On his death in 1870 he was
succeeded by Shirley Brooks, who was the first to start the now
distinctive feature of the paper, Essence of Parliament; and, on the
death of Brooks in 1874, Tom Taylor became editor and retained the
post till his death. Meanwhile, the new contributors had included:
in 1845, Watts Phillips, the dramatist; in 1846, ‘Jacob Omnium'
(Matthew J. Higgins); in 1847, Horace Smith, part-author, with his
brother James, of Rejected Addresses ; in 1848, Henry Silver and
Sutherland Edwards ; in 1850, James Hannay; while other im-
portant contributors were Reynolds Hole, dean of Rochester, and
Charles L. Eastlake, keeper of the National Gallery. In 1845
appeared Coventry Patmore's single contribution to Punch, a
poem on the massacre of Arabs at Dahra ; and in 1846 came
Tennyson's reply in verse to an attack on him by Bulwer Lytton.
The artists who drew for the paper included, besides Thackeray
and others previously mentioned, H. G. Hine, Alfred Forrester
(‘Alfred Crowquill '), Sir John Gilbert, Hablot K. Browne, who
worked for Punch from 1842 to 1869; Richard Doyle, whose work
appears first in the same Christmas number for 1843 that con-
tained Hood's The Song of the Shirt, and who is best known
by the cover still in use; and 'Cuthbert Bede' (Edward Bradley),
the author of Verdant Green, a book which carried on the tradition
of The English Spy and Life in London. Punch, however, is
chiefly famous for its five principal artists. John Leech had been
1 See, ante, vol. XII, chap v.
## p. 239 (#269) ############################################
vi]
Contributors to Punch
239
drawing for Bells Life in London when he was brought to Punch
by Percival Leigh. By 1844, he was paramount on the artistic
side of the paper and in the cartoons. His studies of low life ;
his scenes in the life of sport in which Mr Briggs revives, to
some extent, the humours of Mr Jorrocks); his ridicule of the
beards and moustaches that had come into fashion after the Crimean
war, of the female movement known as 'Bloomerism' and of the
crinoline-all these present a full and lively picture of the age on
its social side, filled with gentle satire, never coarse, and only unfair,
perhaps, in the case of the Volunteer movement. In 1850 John
Tenniel began his work for Punch, and brought into the paper the
dignity which, during his career, gave to Punch's pictorial comments
on political affairs an impressive weight without loss of fun. In the
following year, Charles Keene, introduced by Henry Silver, began
those studies of homely humour which continued the tradition of
the earlier works by Leech. In 1860, George du Maurier, the
typical satirist of the mid-Victorian era, put upon Punch the seal of
'gentility. The follies and foibles of society,' the mistakes of the
vulgar, the beauty of refined womanhood were the themes of this
delicate art. And, in 1867, Linley Sambourne brought in his lively
fancy, graceful humour and decorative design.
Punch has had many rivals, the most important of which were
Tom Hood's Fun, illustrated by E. G. Dalziel, and Judy, illus-
trated by Calvert. None of the rivals, however, was able to
sustain the freshness of interest, combined with the moderation
and refinement which have preserved, though they did not
create, the eminence of Punch. During most of the years of the
journal's existence it has proved a faithful mirror of the changing
times ; and the art, literature, politics and manners of the age
cannot be studied without it.
## p. 240 (#270) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
THE LITERATURE OF TRAVEL, 1700—1900
A CHAPTER on the literature of travel must treat of widely
different things, and should open with some attempt at definition.
The phrase "literature of travel' suggests, in the first instance,
such books as Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Kinglake's Eothen,
Borrow's Bible in Spain, Dufferin's Letters from High Lati-
tudes, Stevenson's Inland Voyage-books in which the personality
and literary power of the writer count for more than his theme,
books which need not treat of anything new, but merely of
something sufficiently unusual to provide an interesting topic for
a writer who, in any case, would be interesting. The travels
described in such narratives need not be historical or intrinsically
notable. Their value rather lies in this, that they provide a topic
for literature. Their writers are known rather as authors than as
travellers. But such books are, relatively, few. Most writers on
travel are remembered as travellers rather than as authors, and
the value of their works lies not so much in revealing the per-
sonality and literary power of the writer as in successfully describing
his journeys and discoveries. “No one expects literature in a book
of travel,' says Mary Kingsley. Countless printed pages record the
travels and discoveries of two centuries. This chapter can only be
kept within reasonable limits by recognising that the literature of
travel and the written records of travel are not the same thing.
The present purpose is to mention such books only as can claim
to belong to literature. Any general definition would be difficult,
since every work must be judged by its own merits, and the best
books possess an individuality which refuses to be reduced to
categories. Moreover, established repute must be taken into
account: for any work which stands as the monument of a great
achievement, apart from purely technical or scientific matter, has
won a place in literature.
Yet, in general, there are two qualifications. In the first place,
## p. 241 (#271) ############################################
CH. VII]
William Dampier
241
one who writes about travel should have something of the born
traveller in him, something of the spirit of Tennyson's Ulysses or
Browning's Waring. Whatever we do, let us not sit still; there's
time enough for that when we lose the use of our legs. ' So writes
a notable traveller, now little read, E. D. Clarke; and, again,
* The joy I feel in the prospect of visiting the countries within the
Arctic is not to be expressed. ' Secondly, the author must write
in the same vein, so that the narrative shall itself reflect the spirit
and passion of travel which possesses the writer.
In a travel-book, viewed as literature, accuracy is no merit,
unless the style and character of the work enjoin accuracy. Thus,
in Dampier's Journals or Cook's Narrative or Darwin's Voyage of
the Beagle, since the very nature and purpose of these books
stamp them as faithful records, any flaw in accuracy would be
a literary flaw. But, in reading Borrow's Bible in Spain, one of
the finest travel-books ever written, no one pauses to ask whether
every page depicts actual occurrences exactly as they happened.
For Borrow, catching the very spirit of the picaresquè romance,
gives a truer picture of Spain than any accurate description could
offer. He views and depicts the country in the light of his own
sympathetic genius.
In books of discovery, since they are, in some sort, scientific
histories, accuracy is demanded; yet, even in this kind, there are
exceptions-for example, Bruce's Travels in Abyssinia. Here,
the veteran hero, telling his story years after the event, views
through the magnifying haze of memory, illuminated by a pic-
turesque and transparent personal vanity, the fantastic and exotic
melodrama in which he had played a part. It matters little if his
narrative was coloured by his dreams. He has painted for us the
true Abyssinia as no one else could have done.
William Dampier, sailor, logwood-cutter, buccaneer or pirate,
privateer and explorer, may be regarded as the pioneer of modern
travellers. At two-and-twenty, he became under-manager of a
Jamaica estate; but soon wandered away to trade, to logwood-
cutting in Yucatan and to buccaneering. For seven years (1679—
86), he served under various pirate-captains along the Spanish
Main and in the Pacific, and then spent five adventurous years
(1686—91) wandering homewards from California by the East
Indies and the Cape. After publishing narratives of his voyages,
he was sent by the admiralty as commander of an exploring
expedition to New Holland (Australia). His ship foundered
16
E. L. XIV.
CH. VII.
## p. 242 (#272) ############################################
242 Literature of Travel, 1700—1900
[CH.
6
'through perfect age' at Ascension on the homeward voyage.
Dampier was afterwards tried by court-martial for cruelty to his
lieutenant, was found guilty and declared unfit to command a
king's ship. However, he soon sailed in command of two privateers
to the South sea (1703—7) upon a voyage diversified by mutinies,
desertions and disruption. In 1708–11, Dampier served as pilot
to the privateer Woodes Rogers.
Dampier's experiences as logwood-cutter and pirate supply the
best part of his writings. This common seaman, serving before
the mast in a pirate-ship, writes with a curious gentleness and
sympathy and in vigorous, dignified, expressive prose. A born
wanderer and observer, he describes with quaint and picturesque
fidelity seas, coasts, people, plants and animals. His observations
on peoples, customs and trade have a distinct historical value.
All the Indians that I have been acquainted with who are under the
Spaniards seem to be more melancholy than other Indians that are free; and
at these public meetings when they are in the greatest of their jollity, their
mirth seems to be rather forced than real. Their songs are very melancholy
and doleful, so is their music; but whether it be natural to the Indians to be
thus melancholy or the effect of their slavery, I am not certain. But I have
always been prone to believe that they are then only condoling their misfor-
tunes, the loss of their country and liberties, while although those that are
now living do not know nor remember what it was to be free, yet there seems
to be a deep impression in their thoughts of the slavery which the Spaniards
have brought them under, increased probably by some traditions of their
ancient freedom.
He thus describes a piratical episode in Nicaragua :
The next morning the Spaniards killed one of our tired men.
stout old grey-headed man, aged about eighty-four, who had served under
Oliver in the time of the Irish Rebellion; after which he was at Jamaica, and
had followed privateering ever since. He would not accept of the offer our
men made him to tarry ashore, but said he would venture as far as the best
of them; and when surrounded by the Spaniards he refused to take quarter,
but discharged his gun amongst them, keeping a pistol still charged; so they
shot him dead at a distance. His name was Swan. He was a very merry
hearty old man, and always used to declare he would never take quarter.
He was a
Captain Woodes Rogers, commander of two privateer ships,
wrote an admirable account of his expedition (1712). He briefly
describes the outward voyage to Juan Fernandez, duly narrates
with greater fullness the exciting story of his cruise in the south
Pacific, the capture of various prizes and of the city of Guayaquil,
and the fight with the Manila galleon and her consort. Here and
there, the reader is tempted to discern the hand of his pilot
Dampier; for example, in the description of 'humming-birds, not
much larger than humble-bees, their bills no thicker than a pin,
## p. 243 (#273) ############################################
vil] Anson's Voyage Round the World 243
their legs proportional to their bodies, and their minute feathers
of most beautiful colours. ' One passage has a permanent and
singular interest; it describes how they found on the island of
Juan Fernandez
>
a man cloathed in goat-skins, who seemed wilder than the original owners of
his apparel. His name was Alexander Selkirk, a Scotsman, who. . . had
lived alone on the island for four years and four months. . . . He had with
him his clothes and bedding, with a firelock and some powder and bullets,
some tobacco, a knife, a kettle, a bible, with some other books, and his mathe-
matical implements. He diverted himself and provided for his sustenance as
well as he could; but had much ado to bear up against melancholy for the
first eight months, and was sore distressed at being left alone in such a
desolate place. He built himself two huts. . . thatched with long grass and
lined with goat skins. . . . He. . . employed himself in reading, praying and singing
psalms, so that he said he was a better Christian during his solitude than he
had ever been before. . . . When his clothes were worn out, he made himself
a coat and cap of goat-skins, which he stitched together with thongs of the
same, cut out with his knife, using a nail by way of a needle or awl. . . . At his
first coming on board, he had so much forgotten his language, for want of
use, that we could scarcely understand him, as he seemed to speak his words
by halves.
In 1740—4, commodore Anson, afterwards lord Anson and
first lord of the admiralty, made his famous voyage round the
world. The account of it was the joint production of Anson
himself and his chaplain Walters. The narrative closely holds
the reader throughout, describing how a squadron of seven vessels
sailed from Spithead for the South sea and Panama, there to join
hands with Vernon's trans-Atlantic expedition; and how, off Tierra
del Fuego, by 'a continual succession of such tempestuous weather as
surprised the oldest and most experienced mariners' it was reduced
'to a couple of shattered, half-manned cruisers, and a sloop. '
After long refitting at Juan Fernandez, two ships sailed out-
once more a formidable fighting force. They attacked and burnt
the town of Paita; and, after long watching and waiting, they
captured the Manila galleon carrying a million and a half of
dollars. Finally, Anson reached home in a single treasure-laden
ship.
Thus was this expedition finished, when it had lasted three years and nine
months; after having, by its event, strongly evinced this important truth:
That though prudence, intrepidity and perseverance united are not exempted
from the blows of adverse fortune, yet in a long series of transactions
they usually rise superior to its power, and in the end rarely fail of proving
successful.
The wreck of the 'Wager,' one of Anson's ships, on a desolate
island of southern Chile, produced several narratives. The most
notable of these was written twenty-six years after the event by
16-2
## p. 244 (#274) ############################################
244 Literature of Travel, 1700—1900 (CH.
admiral John Byron, nick-named 'foul-weather Jack, who had
sailed as a young officer in the ‘Wager. ' It is a most moving and
well told story of wanderings by land and sea, and possesses a
further literary interest inasmuch as the admiral's more famous
grandson used his 'grandad's narrative' for the description of
storm and shipwreck in Don Juan. A typical passage may be
given:
I had hitherto steered the boat; but one of our men, sinking under the
fatigue, expired soon after, which obliged me to take the oar in his room and
row against this heart-breaking stream. Whilst I was thus employed, one
of our men, whose name was John Bosman, tho' hitherto the stontest man
among us, fell from his seat under the thwarts, complaining that his strength
was quite exhausted for want of food, and that he should die very shortly.
As he lay in this condition, he would every now and then break out in the
most pathetic wishes for some little sustenance; that two or three mouthfuls
might be the means of saving his life. The Captain at this time had a large
piece of boiled seal by him and was the only one that was provided with
anything like a meal: but we were become so hardened against the impres.
sion of others' sufferings by our own; so familiarised to scenes of this and
every other kind of misery, that the poor man's dying entreaties were rain.
I sat next to him when he dropped, and having a few dried shell-fish (about
five or six) in my pocket, put one from time to time in his mouth, which
served only to prolong his pains; from which, however, soon after my little
supply failed, he was released by death. For this and another man . . . We
made a grave in the sands.
Several voyages of exploration, despatched to the Pacific in
the reign of George III, were described in readable and interesting
narratives by their commanders, John Byron (1764–6), Wallis and
Carteret (1766—8), James Cook (1768–71, 1772—5, 1776—9)
and George Vancouver (1791–5). To the general reader, there
is some sameness about the maritime part of these narratives,
wherein hardships, dangers and sufferings, the chances of the sea
and losses by disease are quietly treated as matters of course, so
that the story of a voyage is, in great part, almost like a domestic
a
diary. These narratives become more like travel-books when land
is touched. Carteret wrote an entertaining account of his pro-
ceedings at Madeira, and Wallis gives a more fresh and lively
account of the Society islands, discovered by him, than does his
more famous successor Cook.
The pre-eminent interest of Cook's first voyage, the greatest
among English voyages of discovery, gives distinction to his
narrative; and it seems almost impertinent to criticise as literature
the book in which a great man plainly and modestly sets forth
a great achievement. Yet, the account which has been most often
published was compiled by Hawkesworth from the journals of
## p. 245 (#275) ############################################
vii] Navigators of the Eighteenth Century 245
VII
Cook and of Joseph Banks, who accompanied the expedition as
botanist; and most people will probably find this compilation
more readable than Cook's own narrative, and will also find
Banks's journal more interesting than Cook's account. Cook's
narrative is the work of a navigator: Banks's journal is the work
of an alert scientific mind, eagerly on the watch to observe and to
describe. Cook writes thus about the most exciting and hazardous
incident of the voyage:
Our change of situation was now visible in every countenance, for it was
most sensibly felt in every breast: we had been little less than three months
entangled among shoals and rocks, that every moment threatened us with
destruction; frequently passing our nights at anchor within hearing of the
surge that broke over them; sometimes driving towards them even while
our anchors were out, and knowing that if by any accident, to which an
almost continuous tempest exposed us, they should not hold, we must in a
few minutes inevitably perish. But now, after having sailed no less than
360 leagues, without once having a man out of the chains hearing the lead
even for a minute, which perhaps never happened to any other vessel, we
found ourselves in an open sea, with deep water; and enjoyed a flow of
spirits which was equally owing to our late dangers and our present security:
yet the very waves, which by their swell convinced us that we had no rocks
or shoals to fear, convinced us also that we could not safely put the same
confidence in our vessel as before she had struck.
ments of London in the ancient times, more curious than amusing.
6
Thackeray, therefore, nowhere has a good word to say for anything
about Life in London except the pictures. “More curious than
amusing' is a just criticism. The work is curious, partly for the
details that it furnishes of London life in a period when manners
were very pompous or very vulgar; and partly for its wealth in
the slang of the time. Egan was a master of the 'flash' and the
flashy; and Life in London contains as many slang phrases as he
could put into it. Two years later, he was to furnish the slang
phrases to Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
(1823); and one of his two illustrators, George Cruikshank, had
already drawn a plate for Andrewes's Dictionary of the Slang
and Cant Languages (1809).
Part of the success enjoyed by the work was due, no doubt,
to its readers' belief that they could name the originals of the
fictitious characters. Imitations came swift and frequent. In the
summer of 1822 plays founded upon the story were being acted at
no less than ten theatres in and about London ; and among the
adapters were Charles Dibdin, whose version was played at the
Olympic, and W. T. Moncrieff, whose play ran for more than 300
nights at the Adelphi theatre. It was Moncrieff who, in answer
to the accusation that Egan and he had made their age the age of
flash, replied in the wellknown but inconclusive saying, 'Any age
is better than the age of cant'-cant implying, of course, the pro-
,
tests of certain portions of the press and of some religious bodies.
Egan himself produced, in 1822, a dramatic version of the story,
which was played without success (save for a pony-race round the
theatre) at Astley's. The book was, also, translated into French.
Out of the sixty-five imitations of it which Egan stated that he had
## p. 225 (#255) ############################################
vi]
The English Spy
225
reckoned, the most important was Real Life in London, or, the
Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq. and his cousin,
the Hon. Tom Dashall, through the Metropolis ; exhibiting a
living picture of fashionable characters, manners, and amuse-
ments in high and low life, which was published in sixpenny
numbers in 1821, with excellent illustrations by Heath, Alken,
Dighton, Rowlandson and others. Real Life in London is a
pleasanter book than its prototype. Some have held that Egan
wrote it; but the author had a purer style, a cleaner mind
and a wider knowledge of London than Egan. The book shows
many more sides of London life than his; though the formal
descriptions of wellknown scenes or buildings, here and there
inserted amid matter of a very different character, recall very
forcibly Mr Bouncer's letters to his aunt in Verdant Green.
Another imitation was Life in Paris: The Rambles of Dick
Wildfire (1821), written, it is suspected, by David Carey, and
illustrated by George Cruikshank, who had never been to Paris,
but was accustomed to drawing his own idea of French people in
his caricatures, and took his scenes from the drawings and paintings
of other artists. An offshoot of Life in London was The
English Spy: An Original Work, Characteristic, Satirical, and
Humorous, illustrated with many coloured plates, of which the
greater number are by ‘Robert Transit' (i. e. Robert Cruikshank),
at least one (not in his pleasantest vein) by Rowlandson and a
few by other hands, and written by 'Bernard Blackmantle,' a
pseudonym for Charles Molloy Westmacott. Westmacott, whose
Points of Misery (1823) was illustrated by George Cruikshank,
appears to have been a blackmailer ; but he was a spirited and
amusing writer, and, though The English Spy, both in text and
in illustrations, is sometimes as coarse as ever was Smollett in
word or Gillray in drawing, it contains many lively representations
of life, high and low, gives much curious information about the
customs and manners of the day and about real people still
recognisable under their fictitious names, and preserves many tales
of a past age. It attempts to do for many places in England
what Life in London and Real Life in London had done for
the metropolis. Eton and Westminster schools, the university
of Oxford, Brighton, Bath and Cheltenham, London and the
suburbs of London, Cowes, Portsmouth and Doncaster races, all
find a place in Westmacott's racy pages; and Robert Cruikshank's
plates are as full of vigour and variety as the author's prose and
In or about 1823, a young artist, named Theodore Lane,
15
6
verse.
E. L. XIV.
CH, VỊ.
## p. 226 (#256) ############################################
226
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
brought to Pierce Egan a series of original and effective designs
representing the life of an actor from his stage-struck days to his
triumph; and round them Egan wrote The Life of an Actor,
which was published in 1824. Though it suffers from all the
faults of Egan's flashy style, the book is well designed and inte-
resting, while the footnotes are full of theatrical stories of various
merit. It was Lane, also, who illustrated Egan's Anecdotes,
Original and Selected, of the Turf, the Chase, the Ring, and the
Stage, published in 1827. In the following year, Egan brought
out The Finish to the Adventures of Tom, Jerry, and Logic,
in their Pursuits through Life In and Out of London, with
illustrations by Robert Cruikshank. To some extent, the work
was intended as a sop to those who had attacked the im-
morality of Life in London. Logic dies, at which no one would
be surprised, though it is difficult not to resent the attempt to
make his end pathetic. Corinthian Tom, attempting a little
genuine sport, breaks his neck in the hunting-field ; his cast-off
mistress, Corinthian Kate, dies of drink and starvation, and
Jerry alone is left alive, to settle down in the country with a
virtuous wife. The illustrations are admirable; and the text is
more amusing, less vulgarly written and less offensive in subject
than that of Life in London. Among the books on life in London
during the end of the eighteenth and the early years of the nine-
teenth centuries, one other demands notice, A Book for a Rainy
Day, or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766—1833 by
John Thomas Smith. John Thomas Smith, who was born in a
hackney coach on the way from Earl street, Seven Dials, to Great
Portland street, on a June evening in 1766 and died in April
1833, was an artist, a writer and a Londoner, and wrote a life
of his father's master, the sculptor Nollekens, which is unmatched
for malicious candour and vivid detail. Art-student, portrait-
painter, sightseer, writer, gossip, and keeper of the prints in the
British museum, Smith spent his sixty-seven years in close touch
with the artistic and literary life of London. He had a keen
curiosity about things and people past and present, a retentive
memory and a gift for gossip; and his book is one of the most
entertaining and most trustworthy memorials of his period. Pub-
lished twelve years after his death, it forms a valuable corrective
to the flashy fictions of Egan and his like.
It is significant that, within twelve hours of the appearance of
Life in London, the title, the names and the story were seized
upon by James Catnach, who put forth, from his printing-house
## p. 227 (#257) ############################################
VI]
James Catnach
227
verses.
6
in Monmouth court, Seven Dials, a twopenny broadside, entitled
Life in London; or, the Sprees of Tom and Jerry; attempted in
cuts and verse, with twelve plates very roughly imitated from the
Cruikshanks. James Catnach had long been doing for the poor
what Egan attempted to do for the rich-provide them with
highly seasoned literature. The son of a north-country printer
who, at Alnwick, had issued volumes illustrated by the wood-
cuts of Bewick and Clennell, James Catnach set up as a printer
of popular literature in Seven Dials in the year 1813. He was
the most eminent and successful of his class, though the rivalry
of the older business of Pitts, in Great St Andrew street hard
by, was at first severe. In those days, when newspapers cost
7d. or 8}d. , and good cheap literature was all but unknown,
Catnach performed an important service for the working classes.
He printed and sold illustrated books for children, some at a
farthing, some at a halfpenny, some at a few pence; and very
good, in their way, they were, with their simple renderings of
famous fairy stories, their moral lessons and improving or amusing
He wrote, or procured for so much as 28. 6d. apiece from
the street poets, ballads on passing events—the battle of Waterloo,
the death of princess Charlotte, the attempt to rid Covent garden
theatre of what Tom and Jerry called 'gay Cyprians,' while
Tom Dashall and Bob Tallyho knew them as 'dashing. Catnach
sold history at one penny a sheet; he mourned the death of
Jack Randall, the eminent pugilist; he published very interesting
cuts of the cries of London ; he gave, from day to day, a vivid
and various picture of the life of his times; and in his broadsheets
and flysheets may be found the mind of the labouring and the
criminal classes of his period. To Catnach one may turn for
information about coaching, about omnibuses, about Sir Robert
Peel's new and derided police-about all the turbulent life of the
London streets. He dealt, also, largely in fiction disguised as
truth-much as a modern newspaper does. Part of the handsome
fortune that he made must have arisen from the dreadful scandals,
the duels between ladies of fashion, the elopements and so forth,
that he invented for the delectation of his readers' hearty appetites.
But chiefly he was known for his works on crime. Those were the
days of highwaymen; and about highwaymen, whom the educated
classes knew to be pitiful scoundrels, there is practically no con-
temporary literature except that of the kind published by Catnach
or Pitts. Those were the days of public executions, when not only
a gay demeanour but a confession and ‘last words' were expected
15-2
## p. 228 (#258) ############################################
228
Caricature and Sport [CH.
of the criminal. The ordinary of Newgate usually published a
paper; but his accounts were jejune, compared with those that
Catnach or Pitts could produce. There was a safe and brisk
.
market for 'Last Sorrowful Lamentations,' with portrait, con-
fession and a woeful ballad, all on one sheet. In the description
of murders Catnach excelled. On the occasion of the famous
'Red Barn' murder, in 1828, Catnach sold, it is said, more than
one million copies of the murderer Corder's confession and a
ballad. Previously, he had done very well with the yet more
famous murder of Weare by Thurtell, in 1823.
Catnach, however, did not enjoy the field of murder all to
himself. At this period, the interest in brutal crime and more
brutal punishment was, perhaps, even livelier in all classes than it
is today. On the Cato street conspiracy of 1820 The Observer
newspaper sailed to triumph. Clement, the proprietor, not only
gave pictures of the stable and hayloft in Cato street where
the conspirators were captured, but defied the law by publishing
a full account of the trial before the verdict was given. On the
occasion of the murder of Weare by Thurtell, he was yet more
lavish, and was, indeed, held to have overstepped the mark of
propriety. The objections, which were levelled chiefly at the
illustrations, may be held to have been captious, and even inspired,
to some extent, by the envy of less enterprising newspapers; for
these were days when no reputable journal was ashamed to
give great prominence to reports of crime: even The Annual
Register published the evidence and the verdict in important
cases. These were the days, too, when The Newgate Calendar
was brought out. The original series, The Newgate Calendar; or,
Malefactors' Bloody Register, published in or about 1774, con-
tained in its five volumes notorious crimes from 1700 to the date
of publication. Between 1824 and 1826, Andrew Knapp and
William Baldwin, attorneys-at-law, issued, in four volumes, The
Newgate Calendar, comprising interesting memoirs of the most
notorious characters; and, in or about 1826, they issued, in six
volumes, The New Newgate Calendar, which consisted of their
original series much enlarged and with the preface abbreviated.
The Calendar consists of the lives, crimes, trials and (where
inflicted) tortures and executions, of criminals of many kinds,
from miserable thieves or forgers to murderers, from murderers
to those accused of rebellion and high treason. It is, indeed,
as Sir Walter Scott's little friend, Marjory Fleming, said, 'a book
that contains all the Murders: all the Murders did I say, nay all
## p. 229 (#259) ############################################
vi]
The Newgate Calendar
229
6
Thefts and Forgeries that ever were committed. Of The Newgate
Calendar, there is no better critic than Marjory Fleming. "The
Newgate Calender,' she writes, “is very instructive [and] Amusing,
and shews us the nesesity of doing good and not evil. ' "The
history of all the Malcontents that ever was hanged is very
amusing,' she writes later ; but, at the same time, it 'fills me
with horror and consternation. The author of the very improving
preface to the first series could have said no more. Knapp and
Baldwin, in the preface to their earlier series, attempt to connect
their labours with the protest, then being raised, against the
severity of the English law; but Marjory Fleming goes to the
root of the matter. The Newgate Calendar stands at the head
of the English literature of crime. It was worth the while of
attorneys-at-law to do for the educated classes what Catnach and
others had long been doing for the poor; and The Newgate
Calendar was developed out of the sheets sold by hawkers at
public executions.
The success of Life in London was partly due, no doubt,
to Pierce Egan's great personal popularity ; he was known as
Glorious Pierce,' and the prince regent had commanded that
he should be presented at court. For Egan was the first great
sporting journalist, in days when journalism had discovered the
dignity and the beneficence of sport. To understand Egan's
eminence in this field, it is necessary to go back some years. The
eighteenth century—the century, in England, of reason and system-
systematised, to some extent, English sport. From the eighteenth
century, the then distinctively English sport of pugilism received
organisation and science. In the reign of George I, fighting with
fists had begun to take the place of the combats with sword
or cudgel. James Fig, 'the father of the ring,' who opened in
1719 the Academy in Tottenham-court road, where the famous
captain Godfrey and other athletes exhibited their skill, was
swordsman as well as boxer. It remained for Jack Broughton,
the champion from 1734 to 1750, to reduce boxing to an accurate
science; and Daniel Mendoza, champion from 1784 to 1820, intro-
duced 'a new, a more rapid, and more elegant style of boxing, and
a more artistic technique. By the close of the eighteenth century,
boxing had not only, like hunting, become systematised ; thanks
to the pleasure taken in the prize-ring by the prince of Wales and
his brothers, pugilism was the most fashionable of amusements
and of spectacles. The passion for this form of sport ran through
all classes, and was more ardent even than the modern passion for
## p. 230 (#260) ############################################
230
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
football. On the one hand, it may be remembered that the last
desire expressed before execution by Thurtell, the murderer of
Weare, was 'to read Pierce Egan's account of the great fight
yesterday. On the other hand, a man of intellect, like William
Hazlitt, was a genuine lover of sport, and would take infinite
trouble to see a prize-fight. In The New Monthly Magazine for
February 1822', Hazlitt describes how he travelled on a cold and
wet December night to Hungerford, and went bedless, in order to
see 'the Gas-man' (Thomas Hickman) fight Bill Neate. The paper
gives what is, perhaps, the most vivid description of a prize-fight
ever written. The reader may realise by its means all the details
of prize-fighting that to modern taste appear brutal and disgusting;
but he will be left in no doubt about the pluck and endurance
displayed by the fighters, and, in Hazlitt's comments upon
Hickman’s ‘vapouring and swaggering,' he will find an admirable
statement of the virtues of the true sportsman. Indeed, the
whole position of sport had changed. That athletic exercises
were considered worthy of serious attention, the great illustrated
work of the artist and antiquary, Joseph Strutt, The Sports
and Pastimes of the People of England from the earliest
period (first published in 1801) is a sign. And to pugilism, even
more than to hunting, the patriots of the day liked to point, as
both proving and developing those qualities—courage, endurance,
'bottom,' or unquenchable spirit—which were held to make the
true Briton the equal of any three or more Frenchmen. In the
rooms of John Jackson (Byron's tribute to Jackson as man and as
boxer will be remembered), Tom and Jerry were shown a picture
of an assassination in Rome, the victim having been stabbed with
a dagger; and Logic's comment was :
When comparisons are made, the above plate speaks volumes in favour
of the manly and generous mode resorted to by Englishmen to resent an
insult or to decide a quarrel.
Pugilism, though already subject to attack as brutal and ferocious,
had the great heart of the country behind it. In the service of
pugilism Egan made his fame. He was not, of course, the first
writer on boxing. Captain Godfrey brought out, in or about 1740,
a small Treatise on the Useful Art of Self-defence. Paul Whitehead
had sung of the art in The Gymnasiad (1757); John Byrom,
Robert Barclay and others, had celebrated it in prose or verse;
and the journals, including The Gentleman's Magazine, The Flying
1 Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Waller and Glover, vol. XII, p. 1.
## p. 231 (#261) ############################################
vi]
Literature of Pugilism
231
6
Post, The World and others, had published accounts of prize-
fights. But Egan was the first to make a name for himself as a
sporting journalist. Writing in a florid, slipshod style, by no
means devoid of vigour and vividness, he described the fights with
understanding and at the same time with what many of his readers
probably mistook for 'a literary touch'; and his example has not
yet completely faded from journalism. In 1824, he began editing
a weekly paper, Pierce Egan's Life in London and Sporting
Guide, which, later, developed into the more famous sporting
journal Bell's Life in London. Egan's Book of Sports and
Mirror of Life (1832) is a valuable compilation ; but his most
successful work on sport was his illustrated book, Boxiana; or,
Sketches of Antient and Modern Pugilism, from the days of the
renowned Broughton and Slack, to the championship of Crib.
The work was founded on an earlier work of the same title, pro-
duced by George Smeeton in 1812. The first two volumes of
Egan's book were issued in 1818; and a third in 1821. A new
series', in two volumes, was issued in 1828 and 1829. Here may
be read the lives and achievements of Fig, Broughton, Jackson,
Gulley, Mendoza, Molineaux, Tom Crib, Tom Spring, Jem Ward-
of all the great and lesser heroes of 'the fancy. ' Henry Downes
Miles, who, in 1906, published Pugilistica, the three volumes of
which carried the story of British boxing down to Sayers and Tom
King and the end of the prize-ring, frequently accuses Egan of
inaccuracy; but his book, for nearly a century, was the standard
history of the art, and, in his own day, was the classic work upon
the principal British sport. Among many other publications of
the time concerned with boxing, an honourable place is held by
the illustrated journal, The Fancy, which, between 1821 and 1826,
published memoirs of famous pugilists, accounts of fights, general
sporting intelligence and a few pages of miscellaneous news, all of
which are rich in information on the vigorous and not squeamish
sporting activities of the period.
Hunting, like pugilism, though in a less degree, was systematised
by the eighteenth century, and became a subject of popular, as
well as practical, literature. During the first half, or more, of the
century, every country gentleman hunted, but very many country
gentlemen kept their own packs, which were small and not choicely
bred. Few of them, probably, were maintained on even so steady,
if so nicely 'humorous' a principle as those musical fellows of
Coverly hall in Warwickshire. Squire Western's hounds have
· For bibliographical details, see Pugilistica, 1906, p. xi.
a
## p. 232 (#262) ############################################
232
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
not been closely described; but it is not unlikely that, in spite of
Gervase Markham's works, and Richard Blome's The Gentleman's
Recreation of 1683, and the amount of science displayed by
Somervile in The Chace, such hounds as those of lord Scattercash
were not so rare in the mid-eighteenth century as in the mid-
nineteenth. Then came a remarkable master of hounds-one
who, according to a writer commonly supposed to be Sir Egerton
Brydges, could ‘bag a fox in Greek, find a hare in Latin, inspect
his kennels in Italian, and direct the economy of his stables in
exquisite French'-a scholar and a sportsman, Peter Beckford.
Beckford, in 1781, published at Salisbury a quarto volume,
Thoughts upon Hare and Fox Hunting, which has been held
to 'mark an era not only in the literature but in the history of
hunting. This work, and the same author's Essays on Hunting,
laid the foundation of the art of hunting ; and Peter Beckford's
name has been held in veneration not only by 'Nimrod’ and
other writers on the sport, but by all serious students and
practitioners of the art. After Beckford, good books on hunting
became fairly numerous ; and among them should be mentioned
The British Sportsman by Samuel Howitt, a sportsman and
artist, who married a sister of Rowlandson and worked in close
contact with his brother-in-law. Hunting, coaching, and all
sports with horses offered an attractive field to the artists of
the day, as well as to the writers; and Bunbury proved to be the
ancestor of a long and numerous line, which includes George
Cruikshank, Leech, Robert Seymour and many other famous
names. Among the earliest successors of Bunbury is Henry
Alken, who did excellent sporting pictures between 1816 and
1831. A man of obscure origin (he is supposed to have been stud-
groom or trainer to the duke of Beaufort before he won fame as
an artist), Alken was commended by a writer (probably Christopher
North) in Blackwood's Magazine for his understanding of English
gentlemen—a subject in which George Cruikshank was held to
fail. In the great popularity of sport, Alken found ready employ-
ment as draughtsman. His National Sports of Great Britain
contains fifty admirable coloured engravings, in which his accurate
knowledge and his artistic sense are cleverly combined ; to The
Analysis of the Hunting Field, a volume of papers on the com-
ponents of a hunt reprinted from Bell's Life in London, he
contributed six of his finest designs; and his comic series,
Specimens of Riding, Symptoms of being amazed and others,
deserve the popularity they achieved. If Alken could draw like
1
## p. 233 (#263) ############################################
VI]
Literature of Hunting
233
a gentleman, he was soon to be associated with one who could
write like a gentleman. When Lockhart said of ‘Nimrod' that
he could 'hunt like Hugo Meynell and write like Walter Scott,' he
was doubtless excited into exaggeration by the pleasure of having
hit upon a man who could write of sport without the vulgarity
of Egan. “Nimrod,' whose name was Charles James Apperley
was a man of education, a country squire and a genuine sports-
man. Loss of means turned him to literature; he contributed
articles on sport to The Sporting Magazine, The Quarterly
Review and other journals; but is best known by his two books,
The Life of a Sportsman, and Memoirs of the Life of John
Mytton, both of which were illustrated with coloured engravings
by Alken. The Life of a Sportsman, published in 1842, con-
tains a very pleasant account of country life in days when sport
was no longer confused with debauchery; while its descriptions of
runs to hounds, its lore of hunting and of four-in-hand driving
and its variety of incident and anecdote make it still both valuable
and agreeable. Apperley, though not a Walter Scott, was a good
writer; he knew his subject thoroughly, on both the scientific
and the personal sides, and this work of fiction, though poor in
plot, is rich in interest. Memoirs of the life of John Mytton
appeared as a book in 1837, a portion of the work having been
printed in The New Sporting Magazine in 1835. It shows a
difficult task performed with fidelity and tact. Apperley had been
Mytton's neighbour in Shropshire, and had extended to him
all the care that was possible when both were living in Calais
in order to avoid their creditors. Apperley's task was to write
the life of a man who, while he was one of the most heroic
sportsmen that ever lived, was also drunken, diseased and insane;
and he performed the task with admirable judgment.
Before the death of Apperley, a new sporting writer, of a more
humorous turn, had begun a brilliant career. Like ‘Nimrod,'
,
Robert Smith Surtees was both sporting writer and sportsman.
The second son (and, in his fortieth year, the successor) of a
Yorkshire landowner, he contributed in youth to The Sporting
Magazine, and, in 1831, started, with Rudolf Ackermann the
younger, The New Sporting Magazine, which he edited till 1856.
Here first appeared the comic papers, which, in 1838, were published
in a book under the title of Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities,
with coloured plates by Alken. Lockhart shared the general
1 For the driving of stage-coaches, see Cross, Thomas, The Autobiography of a Stage
Coachman, 1861.
## p. 234 (#264) ############################################
234
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
a
admiration for these comic sketches of sporting life, and urged Sur-
tees to write a book. Surtees made further use of the conception
of Mr Jorrocks, the grocer of sporting tastes, and produced
Handley Cross, or the Spa Hunt, which was enlarged into
Handley Cross, or Mr Jorrocks' Hunt, with pictures by John
Leech. Then came Hawbuck Grange, illustrated by 'Phiz’
(Hablot Knight Browne); Ask Mamma, or The Richest Commoner
in England; Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour, illustrated by Leech;
and Mr Facey Romford's Hounds, illustrated by Leech and
Browne, besides other novels. Surtees was also the author of
the papers in Bell's Life in London, some of which were issued,
with illustrations by Alken, in a volume mentioned above, The
Analysis of the Hunting Field. It is possible that the true worth of
Surtees's work has been a little obscured by the fame of the author of
Pickwick, of which the original idea, a tale of cockney sporting life,
was to some extent suggested by the adventures of Mr Jorrocks.
Surtees is a comic writer of a broad and hearty humour and a
deft and subtle touch. In the invention of comic character and
speech, he comes second only to Dickens. Mr Jorrocks, ‘Facey'
Romford, lord Scamperdale and his friend Jack Spraggon,
Mr Sponge, Mr Jawleyford of Jawleyford court—these, with
nearly every character that Surtees troubles to elaborate, are rich
in humour; while the dialogue in these novels has a force and a
flavour comparable only with that in Dickens, or in some piece of
flourishing invective in Nashe or Greene. Surtees's comedy is,
doubtless, like that of Dickens, mainly a comedy of 'humours' or
personal oddities; and Surtees, it must be admitted, was careless
about construction and about such necessary ingredients of a novel
a
as did not interest him ; but all the fun is rooted in human nature,
and set out with abounding energy. Surtees was fortunate in the
assistance of two young artists who were then carrying on the
succession of Alken and George Cruikshank. Both John Leech
and H. K. Browne were keen sportsmen and good artists; and,
though Leech never learned to draw a horse, while Browne's horses
were as good as Alken’s, both men were comic draughtsmen of
inventiveness and humour. Browne found good material in the
novels of another sporting writer, Francis Edward Smedley, a
cripple with a taste for sporting literature. Smedley, who was for
three years editor of George Cruikshank's Magazine, wrote three
novels of high spirits and rapid comedy, Frank Fairleigh, Lewis
Arundel and Harry Coverdale's Courtship; of which the first is
still, and deservedly, popular.
## p. 235 (#265) ############################################
VI]
Punch
235
The illustrations to the books of which mention has been
made were etched and then coloured by hand. Meanwhile, the
art of wood-engraving, which had become degraded and neglected,
was revived about the close of the eighteenth century by Thomas
Bewick. Bewick and his pupils spread abroad the practice of the
art; and thus there came into being a means of illustration in
black and white very serviceable for the use of the periodical
press. Much as the vitality of pictorial art had helped to bring
into being the literature of the various kinds that have been
described above, so the existence of a number of able engravers
on wood helped to bring into being an illustrated press. In the
early years of the nineteenth century, The Observer, Bell's Life in
London and other papers owned by William Clement, had made a
special feature of their illustrations; and The Observer was quick
to take advantage of the revival in the art of wood-engraving.
At the same time, the refinement of taste and manners brought
the need of a comic journalism that should be free of scurrility
and other offence; and, before the middle of the nineteenth
century, the two influences had combined to produce the most
famous of comic journals, Punch. To the making of Punch and
its various component parts, several streams flowed. Some of
them have already been noticed in this chapter : the burlesque of
the illustrated tour; the illustrated comedy of sport; the political
or social caricature; the book of anecdote and jest. George
Cruikshank, who, in the art of comic draughtsmanship, marks
the transition from the brutality of Gillray or Rowlandson to the
delicate humour of du Maurier or Tenniel, issued, for some years
after 1835, a Comic Almanack, to which eminent authors, among
them Thackeray, contributed ; and Thomas Hood had founded
his famous Comic Annual in 1830. Account must, also, be taken
of certain comic journals that had preceded Punch, among them,
especially, the Figaro and the Charivari of Paris. The honour
of producing the first English comic journal comparable with
Punch belongs to Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, one of many lively
young humourists, the majority of whom became contributors to
the most successful of comic papers. À Beckett, who was a
barrister, and became a police magistrate, started, in 1813, an
illustrated comic journal entitled Figaro in London, which was
illustrated by Robert Seymour and, after him, by Robert Cruik-
shank. This journal à Beckett conducted for three years, and
among his many other ventures were The Wag and The Comic
Magazine.
One of his literary contributors was his successor as
## p. 236 (#266) ############################################
236
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
editor of Figaro, Henry Mayhew, and one of his artists William
Newman, who afterwards did valuable work for Punch. Punchi-
nello, illustrated by Robert Cruikshank, was another, and a short-
lived, predecessor of Punch. Douglas Jerrold's Punch in London
was yet another. In 1830 and onwards, a large amount of young
and eager comic talent, both in art and in literature, was finding
expression; and, in 1841, the best of it combined in the production
of the most respectable and most popular of comic journals. The
facts of the founding of Punch have been disputed. The authorised
view is that Ebenezer Landells, a newspaper projector, and a wood-
engraver who had learned his art from Bewick, had the idea of a
comic journal similar to the Paris Charivari-an idea that had
previously been all but brought to fruit by Douglas Jerrold,
Thackeray, Kenny Meadows, Leech and others. After suggesting
the idea to several publishers in vain, Landells took it to the
printer, Joseph Last, who entertained it favourably, and sent him
to see Henry Mayhew, the son of Last's legal adviser. Mayhew
took him on to see Mark Lemon, a publican turned dramatist,
and the list of the staff was thereupon drawn up. At the next
meeting, Mayhew, Lemon and Stirling Coyne were appointed
joint-editors; Archibald S. Henning, cartoonist; Brine, John
Phillips and William Newman artists in ordinary, and Lemon,
Coyne, Mayhew, Gilbert Abbott à Beckett and W. H. Wills (who
was subsequently secretary to Charles Dickens), the literary staff.
The first number, which appeared on 17 July 1841, contained con-
tributions, also, by Henry Grattan (whose full name was Henry
Grattan Plunkett, and whose pseudonym was ‘Fusbos '), Joseph
Allen, an artist, and F. G. Tomlins. Before the appearance of the
second number the staff had been joined by Douglas Jerrold.
Later additions to the list of contributors in the early days of the
journal's existence were Percival Leigh (whose pseudonym was
'Paul Prendergast'), the author of The Comic Latin Grammar,
a doctor by profession, and a scholarly and gentle-minded wit ;
Albert Smith, well known for his popular lectures on the ascent
of Mont Blanc; H. A. Kennedy; William Maginn; John Oxenford,
dramatic critic; Thackeray and Horace Mayhew, younger brother
of Henry Mayhew.
To the influence of Henry Mayhew has been ascribed the
geniality of tone which differentiated Punch from Charivari ;
but that geniality was tempered, in and after the second number,
by the work of the most remarkable among the early writers for
Spielmann, M. H. , The History of Punch, 1895, chap. I.
1
## p. 237 (#267) ############################################
vi]
Contributors to Punch
237
Punch. Douglas William Jerrold was a dramatist and wit who
had already made his mark with his play, Black-eyed Susan, and
his studies of Men of Character (1838), for which Thackeray
drew illustrations. His papers in Punch, signed 'Q;' the first,
of which appeared on 12 September 1841, were the contri-
butions that attracted attention to the paper; and Jerrold's
work, thenceforth, gave Punch its tone. Here appeared, in
1843, Punch's letters to his son; in 1845, Punch's Complete
Letter-writer; and Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures, which was
issued as a book in 1846. Jerrold wrote several other serial
works for Punch, yet none so popular as Mrs Caudle. This
series, more genially humorous and less satirical than most of
Jerrold's work, made the fortune of Punch. But, in the earlier
years of the paper, it was not Jerrold's comedy but his more
serious writing—the social and political articles signed 'Q'—that
gave the journal its character and distinction. Jerrold was a
man of hasty temper and caustic tongue, but of a warm heart
and of quick sympathy with the oppressed. In his political
philosophy, there may have been some traces of the school of
Godwin ; but his leading idea (or sentiment) was the wickedness
of the rich and the oppressed innocence of the poor. With
satire (sometimes personal) and invective, he fought hard and
fearlessly, if not always wisely, in a good cause; and he gave to
Punch its trend towards liberalism in politics. Thackeray began
his connection with Punch with Miss Tickletoby's Lectures on
English History, and drawings to illustrate, occasionally other
people’s, but usually his own, writings. In Punch, too, appeared
his Diary of Fitz-Jeames de la Pluche ; his Snobs of England,
and his Punch's Prize Novelists. His regular connection with
Punch practically ended in 1851, though his last contribution
to it was published in 1854. In Miss Tickletoby's Lectures
some have seen the germ of The Comic History of England
and The Comic History of Rome, written by Gilbert Abbott
à Beckett, and illustrated by John Leech. Besides these two
prolonged efforts of humour, which, considering the extent and
nature of the task, is wonderfully well maintained, à Beckett
wrote a brilliant piece of parody, The Comic Blackstone, illustrated
by George Cruikshank and John Leech, which, even more than the
Histories, has an instructive, as well as a comic, value, and has even
been recommended as a text-book of law. Some of à Beckett's best
work for Punch consisted of the articles on the trials of a young
barrister which were signed ‘Mr Briefless': a series which gave
## p. 238 (#268) ############################################
238
[CH.
Caricature and Sport
rise, many years later, to the letters of 'A. Briefless, Junior,'
contributed to Punch by Gilbert Abbott à Beckett's son, Arthur
William à Beckett, who, with his brother, Gilbert Arthur à Beckett,
was to join the staff of Punch in later years.
Thomas Hood' began to contribute to Punch in 1843, and
amused himself and his readers with his attacks on the plagiarist,
lord William Lennox, at whom Jerrold and other wits also
had their fling. Hood is best known, however, as a contributor
to Punch, by the famous Song of the Shirt, which appeared in
the Christmas number of the year 1843. The year 1844 increased
the number of contributors by Kenealy, J. W. Ferguson and
Tom Taylor, whose connection with the paper remained unbroken
till his death in 1880. Mark Lemon, into whose hands the sole
editorship of the paper soon passed, remained in control of it for
twenty-nine years : a wise and capable director of a journal which,
by means of the celebrated weekly dinners, has always been
conducted on the principle of co-operation and mutual criticism
among the members of the staff. On his death in 1870 he was
succeeded by Shirley Brooks, who was the first to start the now
distinctive feature of the paper, Essence of Parliament; and, on the
death of Brooks in 1874, Tom Taylor became editor and retained the
post till his death. Meanwhile, the new contributors had included:
in 1845, Watts Phillips, the dramatist; in 1846, ‘Jacob Omnium'
(Matthew J. Higgins); in 1847, Horace Smith, part-author, with his
brother James, of Rejected Addresses ; in 1848, Henry Silver and
Sutherland Edwards ; in 1850, James Hannay; while other im-
portant contributors were Reynolds Hole, dean of Rochester, and
Charles L. Eastlake, keeper of the National Gallery. In 1845
appeared Coventry Patmore's single contribution to Punch, a
poem on the massacre of Arabs at Dahra ; and in 1846 came
Tennyson's reply in verse to an attack on him by Bulwer Lytton.
The artists who drew for the paper included, besides Thackeray
and others previously mentioned, H. G. Hine, Alfred Forrester
(‘Alfred Crowquill '), Sir John Gilbert, Hablot K. Browne, who
worked for Punch from 1842 to 1869; Richard Doyle, whose work
appears first in the same Christmas number for 1843 that con-
tained Hood's The Song of the Shirt, and who is best known
by the cover still in use; and 'Cuthbert Bede' (Edward Bradley),
the author of Verdant Green, a book which carried on the tradition
of The English Spy and Life in London. Punch, however, is
chiefly famous for its five principal artists. John Leech had been
1 See, ante, vol. XII, chap v.
## p. 239 (#269) ############################################
vi]
Contributors to Punch
239
drawing for Bells Life in London when he was brought to Punch
by Percival Leigh. By 1844, he was paramount on the artistic
side of the paper and in the cartoons. His studies of low life ;
his scenes in the life of sport in which Mr Briggs revives, to
some extent, the humours of Mr Jorrocks); his ridicule of the
beards and moustaches that had come into fashion after the Crimean
war, of the female movement known as 'Bloomerism' and of the
crinoline-all these present a full and lively picture of the age on
its social side, filled with gentle satire, never coarse, and only unfair,
perhaps, in the case of the Volunteer movement. In 1850 John
Tenniel began his work for Punch, and brought into the paper the
dignity which, during his career, gave to Punch's pictorial comments
on political affairs an impressive weight without loss of fun. In the
following year, Charles Keene, introduced by Henry Silver, began
those studies of homely humour which continued the tradition of
the earlier works by Leech. In 1860, George du Maurier, the
typical satirist of the mid-Victorian era, put upon Punch the seal of
'gentility. The follies and foibles of society,' the mistakes of the
vulgar, the beauty of refined womanhood were the themes of this
delicate art. And, in 1867, Linley Sambourne brought in his lively
fancy, graceful humour and decorative design.
Punch has had many rivals, the most important of which were
Tom Hood's Fun, illustrated by E. G. Dalziel, and Judy, illus-
trated by Calvert. None of the rivals, however, was able to
sustain the freshness of interest, combined with the moderation
and refinement which have preserved, though they did not
create, the eminence of Punch. During most of the years of the
journal's existence it has proved a faithful mirror of the changing
times ; and the art, literature, politics and manners of the age
cannot be studied without it.
## p. 240 (#270) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
THE LITERATURE OF TRAVEL, 1700—1900
A CHAPTER on the literature of travel must treat of widely
different things, and should open with some attempt at definition.
The phrase "literature of travel' suggests, in the first instance,
such books as Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Kinglake's Eothen,
Borrow's Bible in Spain, Dufferin's Letters from High Lati-
tudes, Stevenson's Inland Voyage-books in which the personality
and literary power of the writer count for more than his theme,
books which need not treat of anything new, but merely of
something sufficiently unusual to provide an interesting topic for
a writer who, in any case, would be interesting. The travels
described in such narratives need not be historical or intrinsically
notable. Their value rather lies in this, that they provide a topic
for literature. Their writers are known rather as authors than as
travellers. But such books are, relatively, few. Most writers on
travel are remembered as travellers rather than as authors, and
the value of their works lies not so much in revealing the per-
sonality and literary power of the writer as in successfully describing
his journeys and discoveries. “No one expects literature in a book
of travel,' says Mary Kingsley. Countless printed pages record the
travels and discoveries of two centuries. This chapter can only be
kept within reasonable limits by recognising that the literature of
travel and the written records of travel are not the same thing.
The present purpose is to mention such books only as can claim
to belong to literature. Any general definition would be difficult,
since every work must be judged by its own merits, and the best
books possess an individuality which refuses to be reduced to
categories. Moreover, established repute must be taken into
account: for any work which stands as the monument of a great
achievement, apart from purely technical or scientific matter, has
won a place in literature.
Yet, in general, there are two qualifications. In the first place,
## p. 241 (#271) ############################################
CH. VII]
William Dampier
241
one who writes about travel should have something of the born
traveller in him, something of the spirit of Tennyson's Ulysses or
Browning's Waring. Whatever we do, let us not sit still; there's
time enough for that when we lose the use of our legs. ' So writes
a notable traveller, now little read, E. D. Clarke; and, again,
* The joy I feel in the prospect of visiting the countries within the
Arctic is not to be expressed. ' Secondly, the author must write
in the same vein, so that the narrative shall itself reflect the spirit
and passion of travel which possesses the writer.
In a travel-book, viewed as literature, accuracy is no merit,
unless the style and character of the work enjoin accuracy. Thus,
in Dampier's Journals or Cook's Narrative or Darwin's Voyage of
the Beagle, since the very nature and purpose of these books
stamp them as faithful records, any flaw in accuracy would be
a literary flaw. But, in reading Borrow's Bible in Spain, one of
the finest travel-books ever written, no one pauses to ask whether
every page depicts actual occurrences exactly as they happened.
For Borrow, catching the very spirit of the picaresquè romance,
gives a truer picture of Spain than any accurate description could
offer. He views and depicts the country in the light of his own
sympathetic genius.
In books of discovery, since they are, in some sort, scientific
histories, accuracy is demanded; yet, even in this kind, there are
exceptions-for example, Bruce's Travels in Abyssinia. Here,
the veteran hero, telling his story years after the event, views
through the magnifying haze of memory, illuminated by a pic-
turesque and transparent personal vanity, the fantastic and exotic
melodrama in which he had played a part. It matters little if his
narrative was coloured by his dreams. He has painted for us the
true Abyssinia as no one else could have done.
William Dampier, sailor, logwood-cutter, buccaneer or pirate,
privateer and explorer, may be regarded as the pioneer of modern
travellers. At two-and-twenty, he became under-manager of a
Jamaica estate; but soon wandered away to trade, to logwood-
cutting in Yucatan and to buccaneering. For seven years (1679—
86), he served under various pirate-captains along the Spanish
Main and in the Pacific, and then spent five adventurous years
(1686—91) wandering homewards from California by the East
Indies and the Cape. After publishing narratives of his voyages,
he was sent by the admiralty as commander of an exploring
expedition to New Holland (Australia). His ship foundered
16
E. L. XIV.
CH. VII.
## p. 242 (#272) ############################################
242 Literature of Travel, 1700—1900
[CH.
6
'through perfect age' at Ascension on the homeward voyage.
Dampier was afterwards tried by court-martial for cruelty to his
lieutenant, was found guilty and declared unfit to command a
king's ship. However, he soon sailed in command of two privateers
to the South sea (1703—7) upon a voyage diversified by mutinies,
desertions and disruption. In 1708–11, Dampier served as pilot
to the privateer Woodes Rogers.
Dampier's experiences as logwood-cutter and pirate supply the
best part of his writings. This common seaman, serving before
the mast in a pirate-ship, writes with a curious gentleness and
sympathy and in vigorous, dignified, expressive prose. A born
wanderer and observer, he describes with quaint and picturesque
fidelity seas, coasts, people, plants and animals. His observations
on peoples, customs and trade have a distinct historical value.
All the Indians that I have been acquainted with who are under the
Spaniards seem to be more melancholy than other Indians that are free; and
at these public meetings when they are in the greatest of their jollity, their
mirth seems to be rather forced than real. Their songs are very melancholy
and doleful, so is their music; but whether it be natural to the Indians to be
thus melancholy or the effect of their slavery, I am not certain. But I have
always been prone to believe that they are then only condoling their misfor-
tunes, the loss of their country and liberties, while although those that are
now living do not know nor remember what it was to be free, yet there seems
to be a deep impression in their thoughts of the slavery which the Spaniards
have brought them under, increased probably by some traditions of their
ancient freedom.
He thus describes a piratical episode in Nicaragua :
The next morning the Spaniards killed one of our tired men.
stout old grey-headed man, aged about eighty-four, who had served under
Oliver in the time of the Irish Rebellion; after which he was at Jamaica, and
had followed privateering ever since. He would not accept of the offer our
men made him to tarry ashore, but said he would venture as far as the best
of them; and when surrounded by the Spaniards he refused to take quarter,
but discharged his gun amongst them, keeping a pistol still charged; so they
shot him dead at a distance. His name was Swan. He was a very merry
hearty old man, and always used to declare he would never take quarter.
He was a
Captain Woodes Rogers, commander of two privateer ships,
wrote an admirable account of his expedition (1712). He briefly
describes the outward voyage to Juan Fernandez, duly narrates
with greater fullness the exciting story of his cruise in the south
Pacific, the capture of various prizes and of the city of Guayaquil,
and the fight with the Manila galleon and her consort. Here and
there, the reader is tempted to discern the hand of his pilot
Dampier; for example, in the description of 'humming-birds, not
much larger than humble-bees, their bills no thicker than a pin,
## p. 243 (#273) ############################################
vil] Anson's Voyage Round the World 243
their legs proportional to their bodies, and their minute feathers
of most beautiful colours. ' One passage has a permanent and
singular interest; it describes how they found on the island of
Juan Fernandez
>
a man cloathed in goat-skins, who seemed wilder than the original owners of
his apparel. His name was Alexander Selkirk, a Scotsman, who. . . had
lived alone on the island for four years and four months. . . . He had with
him his clothes and bedding, with a firelock and some powder and bullets,
some tobacco, a knife, a kettle, a bible, with some other books, and his mathe-
matical implements. He diverted himself and provided for his sustenance as
well as he could; but had much ado to bear up against melancholy for the
first eight months, and was sore distressed at being left alone in such a
desolate place. He built himself two huts. . . thatched with long grass and
lined with goat skins. . . . He. . . employed himself in reading, praying and singing
psalms, so that he said he was a better Christian during his solitude than he
had ever been before. . . . When his clothes were worn out, he made himself
a coat and cap of goat-skins, which he stitched together with thongs of the
same, cut out with his knife, using a nail by way of a needle or awl. . . . At his
first coming on board, he had so much forgotten his language, for want of
use, that we could scarcely understand him, as he seemed to speak his words
by halves.
In 1740—4, commodore Anson, afterwards lord Anson and
first lord of the admiralty, made his famous voyage round the
world. The account of it was the joint production of Anson
himself and his chaplain Walters. The narrative closely holds
the reader throughout, describing how a squadron of seven vessels
sailed from Spithead for the South sea and Panama, there to join
hands with Vernon's trans-Atlantic expedition; and how, off Tierra
del Fuego, by 'a continual succession of such tempestuous weather as
surprised the oldest and most experienced mariners' it was reduced
'to a couple of shattered, half-manned cruisers, and a sloop. '
After long refitting at Juan Fernandez, two ships sailed out-
once more a formidable fighting force. They attacked and burnt
the town of Paita; and, after long watching and waiting, they
captured the Manila galleon carrying a million and a half of
dollars. Finally, Anson reached home in a single treasure-laden
ship.
Thus was this expedition finished, when it had lasted three years and nine
months; after having, by its event, strongly evinced this important truth:
That though prudence, intrepidity and perseverance united are not exempted
from the blows of adverse fortune, yet in a long series of transactions
they usually rise superior to its power, and in the end rarely fail of proving
successful.
The wreck of the 'Wager,' one of Anson's ships, on a desolate
island of southern Chile, produced several narratives. The most
notable of these was written twenty-six years after the event by
16-2
## p. 244 (#274) ############################################
244 Literature of Travel, 1700—1900 (CH.
admiral John Byron, nick-named 'foul-weather Jack, who had
sailed as a young officer in the ‘Wager. ' It is a most moving and
well told story of wanderings by land and sea, and possesses a
further literary interest inasmuch as the admiral's more famous
grandson used his 'grandad's narrative' for the description of
storm and shipwreck in Don Juan. A typical passage may be
given:
I had hitherto steered the boat; but one of our men, sinking under the
fatigue, expired soon after, which obliged me to take the oar in his room and
row against this heart-breaking stream. Whilst I was thus employed, one
of our men, whose name was John Bosman, tho' hitherto the stontest man
among us, fell from his seat under the thwarts, complaining that his strength
was quite exhausted for want of food, and that he should die very shortly.
As he lay in this condition, he would every now and then break out in the
most pathetic wishes for some little sustenance; that two or three mouthfuls
might be the means of saving his life. The Captain at this time had a large
piece of boiled seal by him and was the only one that was provided with
anything like a meal: but we were become so hardened against the impres.
sion of others' sufferings by our own; so familiarised to scenes of this and
every other kind of misery, that the poor man's dying entreaties were rain.
I sat next to him when he dropped, and having a few dried shell-fish (about
five or six) in my pocket, put one from time to time in his mouth, which
served only to prolong his pains; from which, however, soon after my little
supply failed, he was released by death. For this and another man . . . We
made a grave in the sands.
Several voyages of exploration, despatched to the Pacific in
the reign of George III, were described in readable and interesting
narratives by their commanders, John Byron (1764–6), Wallis and
Carteret (1766—8), James Cook (1768–71, 1772—5, 1776—9)
and George Vancouver (1791–5). To the general reader, there
is some sameness about the maritime part of these narratives,
wherein hardships, dangers and sufferings, the chances of the sea
and losses by disease are quietly treated as matters of course, so
that the story of a voyage is, in great part, almost like a domestic
a
diary. These narratives become more like travel-books when land
is touched. Carteret wrote an entertaining account of his pro-
ceedings at Madeira, and Wallis gives a more fresh and lively
account of the Society islands, discovered by him, than does his
more famous successor Cook.
The pre-eminent interest of Cook's first voyage, the greatest
among English voyages of discovery, gives distinction to his
narrative; and it seems almost impertinent to criticise as literature
the book in which a great man plainly and modestly sets forth
a great achievement. Yet, the account which has been most often
published was compiled by Hawkesworth from the journals of
## p. 245 (#275) ############################################
vii] Navigators of the Eighteenth Century 245
VII
Cook and of Joseph Banks, who accompanied the expedition as
botanist; and most people will probably find this compilation
more readable than Cook's own narrative, and will also find
Banks's journal more interesting than Cook's account. Cook's
narrative is the work of a navigator: Banks's journal is the work
of an alert scientific mind, eagerly on the watch to observe and to
describe. Cook writes thus about the most exciting and hazardous
incident of the voyage:
Our change of situation was now visible in every countenance, for it was
most sensibly felt in every breast: we had been little less than three months
entangled among shoals and rocks, that every moment threatened us with
destruction; frequently passing our nights at anchor within hearing of the
surge that broke over them; sometimes driving towards them even while
our anchors were out, and knowing that if by any accident, to which an
almost continuous tempest exposed us, they should not hold, we must in a
few minutes inevitably perish. But now, after having sailed no less than
360 leagues, without once having a man out of the chains hearing the lead
even for a minute, which perhaps never happened to any other vessel, we
found ourselves in an open sea, with deep water; and enjoyed a flow of
spirits which was equally owing to our late dangers and our present security:
yet the very waves, which by their swell convinced us that we had no rocks
or shoals to fear, convinced us also that we could not safely put the same
confidence in our vessel as before she had struck.
