Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 3 of 4.—1874-1892

Sunday Pastime and Sunday Closing

In the lines on "Our Sunday – down East" – permission to include which in the programme of any Sabbatarian Penny Reading was freely granted by Punch– he writes: —

Which is the day that should be blest,And to the weary, work-opprest,Bring wholesome pleasure, peace, and rest?Our Sunday.Yet which the day of all the sevenTo our sour lives adds sourer leaven,And leaves poor folk most far from heaven?Our Sunday.

The persistence of the Sabbatarian instinct, even where it was disregarded, is illustrated in the picture of the young lady on a railway platform asking her grandfather to hide their rackets: "We needn't show everybody that we are going to play lawn tennis on a Sunday afternoon."

When in 1888 Sunday boating was allowed in the parks after church time, Punch applauds "George Ranger" and Mr. David Plunket for the act but not the language of the order, which he condemns as "Pharisaical trash." In the same year a largely signed petition was laid before the Upper House of Convocation of Canterbury protesting against the increasing pursuit of Sunday pastime by the "upper and fashionable classes of Society." Punch ridicules the vagueness of the protest against "amusing programmes of fun and frolic," and sums up in these words: —

Our English Sunday is none too lovely or lively an institution, but as yet neither the upper nor the lower classes of English Society have shown any tendency, publicly, to desecrate it. When they do, it will be time enough, if not for the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury, at least for the Public Opinion of the country to express itself upon the matter. Meantime, grandmotherly interference had better let it alone.

Punch had evidently modified his earlier views as to the saving grace of Sunday dullness in England as compared with the Continental Sunday. The Bill for the Sunday closing of public-houses introduced in 1889 is dealt with in detail and at great length. The cartoon of "Sunday à la Pharisee" aims at showing that the habitual toper will not suffer, but that the decent working-man will be incommoded. It is rather unfortunate, however, that the latter is shown sending his little girl to the public-house for his beer. The accompanying verses are founded on a wonderful fulmination in The Times: —

"To hedge people round with petty restrictions instead of teaching them nobility of conduct and a worthy use of liberty, is the perennial resource of shallow and incompetent reformers… A depraved and servile human nature, cribbed, cabined and confined by an infinity of minute regulations enforced by the policemen, is their reading of the social problem… A small minority occasionally injure themselves with bad liquor on Sunday, and these reformers can think of nothing better than to forbid the entire Community to drink on Sundays at all."

Punch descants rhetorically for nearly one hundred lines on Smugby's Sabbath, fanaticism, Pharisaism, etc., but as a Londoner he had probably never witnessed the orgies of the Glasgow Fair. He never failed to insist on the intemperateness of Temperance reformers, but as a supporter of moderate drinking he was himself often guilty of immoderate language.

In regard to anti-Semitism, another of his pet aversions in this period, his record is far less open to criticism. He made a perfectly fair point in representing men of Jewish extraction as the chief offenders, for these were the days of the Libre Parole, edited by Drumont, himself a renegade Jew, and of the anti-Semitic campaign in France which reached its climax in the Dreyfus "affair" in the middle 'nineties. As early as 1881, in one of Du Maurier's pictures, Sir Gorgius Midas is backed up in a tirade against the Jews by "Baron von Meyer," who, with the stigmata of his race written all over him, flatters himself that nobody can suspect his origin. In the cartoon on the Jewish "pogroms" in Russia in 1882, Humanity, compared to a Portia who pleads for and not against the Jews, is shown appealing to the Tsar, who stands with his back turned and arms crossed. How would it read in English, Punch asks, if our papers contained accounts of the murdering of Jews and the burning of their houses in Houndsditch, with the police looking on in amused indifference, and the Home Secretary sending messages of thanks to the murderers?

In the verses published in January, 1882, "A Cry from Christendom," against the old anti-Semitic cry of "Hep! Hep!" Punch indignantly denounces the hounding down of the Hebrew in the name of the Cross: —

Oh out on the Tartuffes of Creed! Let the spirit of Christendom speakPlain words of unfaltering truth for the cause of the helpless and weak.

Punch's Toleration

No warnings of possible retaliation come from Punch; such a possibility did not enter into the calculations of sympathizers with the oppressed Jews, who were regarded as incapable of effective resistance. A different aspect of the question is satirized in references to Society "mariages de convenance" with rich Jewesses, probably not unconnected with a recent notable alliance between a distinguished peer and the daughter of a great Jewish house. Punch's general view, however, was that expressed in the saying that "every country has the Jews which it deserves," and he was ready to admit that the good English Jews were very good indeed. In 1883 he published Sambourne's portrait of Sir Moses Montefiore, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, "who on the 8th day of Chesvan (November 8) entered on the hundredth year of his blameless, brave and beneficent life"; and when the old man died in the summer of 1885 Punch paid him farewell homage in these lines: —

Long in the land his days, whose heart and handAll high and human causes could command;Long in the land his memory will abideHis country's treasure, and his people's pride.

In 1886 Punch vociferously applauded Dean Bradley, Stanley's successor, for "his admirable answer to the three fanatical Protestant-defence Secretaries, who would have forcibly ejected from Westminster Abbey some Roman Catholics who were saying their private prayers around the 'strong quadrilateral barrier of bronze,' which, as stated by Canon Duckworth, protects the tomb of Edward the Confessor from profane hands." He improves the occasion by some general remarks aimed at Protestant visitors to Roman Catholic churches on the Continent: —

Mr. Punch heartily wishes that the conduct of English Protestants visiting the Catholic Churches abroad were anything like as inoffensive, and as appropriate to the sacred precincts, as was that of the poor benighted Romanists in Westminster Abbey, who, thinking that the best use to which a church could be put was to say prayers in it, knelt and prayed accordingly.

After rebuking the insolent caddishness of ill-bred British tourists which not only offended the congregation proper, but scandalized their decent compatriots, Punch continues: —

If Dean Punch saw a hundred 'Arrys, Romans or Rum 'uns of any sort, praying in Westminster Abbey would he interfere? No, bless 'em, certainly not. But if he saw one of them sneaking out a pencil to scribble his name on a monument, or attempting to nick a bit out of a shrine, or off a tomb, he'd be down upon him then and there, and have him up before the nearest police-magistrate charged with "maliciously damaging," and fined heavily for the offence, no matter what his excellent motive might have been for such wanton destruction. And this is what the Dean and Chapter would do, too; for whether it be a fanatic on one side or the other, law and order must not be set aside in favour of such a rule as "Omne ignotum pro Fanatico."

The doctrine is excellent if the language is jocular. But Punch's plea for tolerance is seriously impaired by the virulent hostility with which he had for years assailed the Salvation Army and its founder. It is true that he had always discouraged and discountenanced emotional religion. The visit of Moody and Sankey in 1875 had drawn from him a set of acid verses on "Missionaries in Motley." After describing their methods, he continues: —

Their intent is sincere – let us trust, in all charity —But Religion they cloak in the garb of Vulgarity,And, under a visor of seeming profanity,As comic evangelists, preach Christianity.Those discourses of theirs are an exaggerationOf the jocular species of pulpit oration,Which was brought into vogue by that eminent surgeonAnd physician of souls to the multitude, Spurgeon.An impressible people are they that sit underThese 'cute Boanerges, these smart sons of thunder,Who cause them, at will, to sing psalm or doxologyBy an influence much like electro-biology.Ira Sankey performs, as a musical Stentor,To the mobile vulgus the part of Precentor.His remarkable name may suggest the inquiryIf he ever exhorts them to sing "Dies Iræ?"Quorsum hæc? Can tomfoolery kindle true piety?Maybe so. Human nature is fond of variety.Mr. Merriman's unctuous sallies might irk us,But although a Revival American Circus,Ira Clown in the Ring, decent people would anger,Couldn't Moody and Sankey join Hengler and Sanger?If it didn't conduce much to edification,It would probably pay, as a good speculation.

Punch and the Salvation Army

The verses gave such offence that Punch was moved to publish an explanation a week later, disclaiming any intention to throw any doubts on the motives or the sincerity of the American Evangelists, but maintaining his right to criticize what he honestly believed to be bad taste in the style and manner of their appeals.

Let it be granted that there was much in the early methods of the Salvation Army that provoked opposition and caused the judicious to grieve. The outrageous familiarity with which the most sacred names and subjects were treated in the War Cry; the conversion of the most popular songs into hymn tunes; the military organization, uniforms and titles; the "allonging and marshonging" with big drums and trombones – all these features affronted and disgusted good people who associated worship with privacy and reticence; while the hooligans looked on the Salvationists as sour-faced Puritans, and organized a "Skeleton Army" to break up their meetings. Collisions were frequent, and throughout the 'eighties members of the Salvation Army were fined and even imprisoned as disturbers of the public peace. Those of us who are old enough to remember these scenes can well recall the impression which the Salvationists made upon the detached observer of forty years ago. Men and women and girls, they wore the set look of people who had espoused an unpopular and even perilous cause and were resolved to carry it through. They seldom looked happy, and they had little cause for it. In ten years the physiognomy of the Salvationists had changed, and they went about their work unmolested with serene and cheerful faces. Punch could at least plead this extenuation of his hostility, that it was shared by learned and excellent men. But there is really no excuse for his childish exultation over the Queen's refusal to subscribe to the Salvation Army's funds in 1882, and his jeers at the Archbishop of Canterbury for investing "his modest fiver in the Booth Bank."

The prophecy in which he indulged in that year in an article headed, "Bootheration to 'Em," is worth quoting. Punch regretted the conversion of the Grecian Theatre – "a place of generally harmless recreation for the East End" – into a temple of Salvationism: —

Yet we feel certain that the Army, once possessed of a great permanent meeting-place, will speedily convert it into some sort of Conventicle, the excitement of "drums and excursions" will gradually cease, conservatism will increase, Respectability and recognition by Respectability will be the object of the majority, reformers will arise and "camp out," regiments will desert, and some twenty new Sects will be added to the list of the country which possesses "any number of religions and only one sauce."

Part of the prophecy has been fulfilled; the concluding part, in which the wish was father to the thought, has been falsified. For Punch in these days only saw hysteria and vulgarity in what he considered an unhealthy mania. He seized on the repellent features of the crusade, e.g. the song, "On Board of the 'Allelujah," issued by "Admiral Tug" of the Salvation Navy – and overlooked the sincere and devoted efforts at social reclamation which underlay these exuberances. Mr. Justice Field's decision in June, 1882, allowing Salvationists to hold processions and parades was deplored as likely to encourage all the strange sects enumerated in Whitaker's Almanack– Jumpers, Shakers, Mormons and Recreative Religionists – to go and do likewise. The verses printed in November, 1883, are a bitter and violent tirade against the movement in general and the Booth family in particular, with offensive references to "dear Catherine … blushing so feminine" who had been arrested by a Swiss magistrate: —

All the world knows we're so blessedly 'umble —(How like the Master we follow so well!) —That for a Booth there's no chance of a tumble,Though e'en the Temple of Solomon fell.

Hostility to General Booth

"Atlas" of the World denounced the "Salvation Army nuisance" in the autumn of 1884. It had spoilt a season at Worthing and might do so at Brighton. Punch, welcoming the pious Mr. Edmund Yates as an ally, proposed as a remedy the prohibition of all processions, excepting only those of State requirements, as a relic of barbarism and an anachronism: —

Let the Salvation Army, with their ensigns and captains and uniforms, and drums and trumpets, assemble in their Barracks just as Christians, Jews, Turks and Heathens do in their Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples; and let their recruiting sergeants go about where they list, or where they are likely to 'list; but let this out-of-door irreligious movement, this outrageous travesty of Ecclesiastical symbolism, with its fanatic war-cries, its fanfares, its martial hymns, and brass-band accompaniment, leading to riot and bloodshed on the Lord's Day, let this be forthwith suppressed, as it can be, we believe, by existing law; and if not, let the law be made. Of course that harmless body of publicans and sinners, the Freemasons, would be sufferers by such a regulation; but with His Royal Highness of Wales, their Grand Master, at their head, they would be willing to bear the privation of being occasionally deprived of an open-air display of sashes, aprons and emblems for the sake of law and order.

Punch's animosity towards the Salvationists showed little abatement right on into the 'nineties. General Booth was twice caricatured: in 1885 as "His own Trumpeter" blowing an instrument like a French horn in mid air, and in 1892 as "General Boombastes" – a composite title of derision founded on Bombastes Furioso and General Boum of the Grande Duchesse– in connexion with a great demonstration held by the Salvation Army in Hyde Park in February of that year. Sarcastic references occur from time to time to the finance of the Army, which in those years lent itself to criticism. But science and intellect, cynicism and fastidiousness were routed or converted in the sequel. The Salvation Army came nearer success in reclaiming "the submerged tenth" than any other sect or church: it outlived derision, criticism and scepticism, and earned the tribute of imitation in the organization of the Church Army. No finer example of this conversion is to be found than in the life of Frank Crossley, the senior partner in the great Manchester engineering firm, that noble and benevolent philanthropist, who began in antipathy to the methods of the Salvation Army and devoted the end of his life to intimate, self-sacrificing and cordial co-operation with them in the slums of Ancoats.

Burnand, who succeeded to the editorship of Punch in 1880, was a Roman Catholic; but it cannot be asserted that he abused his opportunities any more than Charles Cooper, who was a Romanist when he joined the editorial staff of the Scotsman, a much more delicate position for a member of that communion. Punch became perhaps less aggressively Protestant, but there was no substantial change in the theological policy of the paper, or in its mainly Erastian attitude in regard to the relations of Church and State. No serious exception can be taken to the verdict on the Revised Version – completed in 1880 – as "a very qualified success if not an absolute failure," coupled with a wish to know what were the suggestions for improvements made by our American cousins. The verses in the same year on "A Life's Work and a Life's Wage," recounting the sad experience of a Devonshire curate who after thirty years' work, applied for an order to enter the workhouse as a pauper – are only a renewal of Punch's familiar complaints on the scandal of underpaid clergy. Eleven years later, in 1891, he takes up the same parable à propos of a statement by Mr. Gladstone to the effect that "if the priest is to live, he must beg, earn or steal," comparing the needy vicar, with eighty pounds a year, and the bishop with five thousand. Yet in the same number, under the heading of "Mitred Misery," Punch has an article on the heavy and extortionate fees incurred by bishops on their installation or translation. The victim is represented as just managing to meet the expenses of his elevation to one episcopal see and his translation to another, but declining an archbishopric on the ground that it would land him in the Bankruptcy Court. In an earlier year the contrast between the well-to-do cleric and the poor is ironically emphasized in the "Consolation" administered by Mr. Dean: "Ah, my poor fellow, your case is very sad, no doubt! But remember that the rich have their troubles too. I dare say, now, you can scarcely realize what it is not to know where to find an investment which will combine adequate security with a decent interest on one's money."

Disestablishment

Doctrinal opportunism is satirized in Du Maurier's picture of the vicar of a seaside town who was "High Church during the season, and Low all the rest of the year." Much in the same spirit is the list of qualifications necessary for a curate in a country parish: the chief desideratum being that he must be able to play tennis with the vicar's daughters. These jests were almost common form at the close of the Victorian age. A more serious situation arose in 1885 owing to the demand for Disestablishment put forward by the Radicals, but Punch refused to treat it seriously. His cartoon, "A False Alarm," shows a chorus of Conservative owls – including Lord Salisbury and Mr. Cross – crying, "Too-whit, too-whoo, Church in Danger."

The Bishop (to his youngest and favourite son): "Now, why shouldn't you adopt the stage as a profession, Theodore? Lord Ronald Beaumanoir, who's a year younger than yourself, is already getting sixteen guineas a week for low comedy parts at the Criterion! The duchess told me so herself only yesterday!"

Punch appends an extract from a speech by Mr. Chamberlain expressing his incredulity of any settlement of this question being arrived at in the Parliament about to assemble. This view is further developed in a burlesque forecast, "The Disestablisher's Diary," with sensational and circumstantial details of the passing of Disestablishment, the conversion of Westminster Abbey into a Coffee Hall, bishops begging in the streets, riots of country clergy, etc. In 1887 the scheme of the late Dean, then Archdeacon or "Harsh Deacon" Farrar (as Punch called him), for a Church House as a Jubilee memorial roused Punch's violent animosity. It was giving a stone to those who needed bread – the poor clergy. In the cartoon on "Mammon the mendicant," who was sending round the hat, John Bull declines to give anything to the seedy cleric for the Church House: "I'd rather put it into your own [hat]."

A long article is devoted in 1890 to the trial of Bishop King of Lincoln, but beyond facetious descriptions of the eminent counsel engaged the only point made is that the bishop never came near the place. In the same year another bishop, Dr. Jayne of Chester, earned Punch's unstinted approval for encouraging dancing among the working classes. At a conference of the Girls' Friendly Society the bishop had remarked that, "until they were prepared to introduce basket-making into London Society as a substitute for quadrilles and waltzes he was not disposed to accept it as an equivalent for balls and dances among girls of other classes." This liberality of view prompted Punch to cut a series of ecstatic capers over the pluck and common sense of "my pithy Jayne."

In agreeable contrast to these punning comments on Church matters are the tributes to two remarkable men, widely sundered in temperament, physique and doctrine, who both passed away in January, 1892. The memorial lines on Cardinal Manning insist that he was much more than

A great priest, shrewd marshaller of men,Subtle in verbal fence with tongue or pen,Ascetic of the cell —

He is extolled as the friend of the poor, the struggling weak, the toiler for temperance, the hastener on of light: —

In many a fray when Right's at odds with Might,Might's foes will miss their friend.

Homage to Spurgeon

It should be remembered that Punch did not easily applaud Temperance advocates in this period, when he avowed himself as "capable of special sympathy with the publicans." Punch owed an amende to Spurgeon as well as to Manning, and made it handsomely. He recognizes Spurgeon's sturdiness and geniality: —

You spoke a potent wordIn the World's ear and listening thousands heard.

Spurgeon stirred the throng, not fastidious or sensitive souls. He was honest, robust, Puritan but not ascetic: —

Crudeness may chill, and confidence offend,But manhood, mother-wit and selfless zeal,Speech clear as light and courage true as steel,Must win the many. Honest soul and brave,The greatest drop their garlands on your grave.

Gertrude: "You never do anything now, Margaret, but go to all sorts of Churches, and read those old Books of Theology. You never used to be like that."

Margaret: "How can I help it, Gerty? I'm writing a Popular Novel!"

At all points Spurgeon was poles apart from the "Adulated Clergyman," one of Punch's "Modern Types" held up to contempt in the previous year, and noted in another section – who develops out of a mincing effeminate boy into an unconventional emotional preacher, ferocious in pulpit denunciations, but full of honeyed sweetness in fashionable drawing-rooms; adored by weak women, distrusted and despised by normal men.

A new rival to the pulpit, it may be noted in conclusion, had sprung up in the "theological romance." Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose Robert Elsmere appeared in 1888, was its most widely read representative. But perhaps her greatest title to our gratitude in this context is the fact that it was her recommendation which induced Messrs. Macmillan to publish Mr. Shorthouse's remarkable novel John Inglesant.

LONDON AND ITS GOVERNMENT

Growth and expansion rather than reconstruction was the leading feature of London in the period with which we are now concerned. The spreading of the "great wen," as Cobbett called it, went on in almost all directions, and the linking up of the once detached village of Kensington with Central London was followed by a remarkable extension of that typically Victorian suburb. In 1884 Punch described travellers journeying for hours and hours in a northerly or westerly direction, only to find that they had reached North Kensington or West Kensington, as the case might be. Already in 1876 he had noted the swallowing up of Brompton in South Kensington. Concurrently with this suburban expansion the disappearance or removal of many old landmarks went on apace. In 1876 Punch had suggested that Temple Bar should be removed by one of the elephants in the Lord Mayor's procession. The long contemplated removal took place in 1878, and the historic site was duly occupied by the pedestal bearing the much-criticized "Griffin," which led to abundant satirical comment in prose and verse and pictures. The block in the traffic had been removed, but the cartoon of "Alice in Blunderland" showed that from an architectural point of view Punch thought the remedy worse than the disease. Cremorne Gardens, the scenes of alternate revelries in high and low life, were closed in 1877, and the withdrawal of "Evans's" licence in 1879 was plaintively celebrated in the lament of a middle-aged Man about Town: —