Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 4 of 4.—1892-1914

Oh! for the days when there were dancers!Oh! for the mazes of the Lancers!With what a nimble step elasticWe tripped it on the light fantastic,With a sweet charm which now is not,Through gay cotillion or gavotte,Or, with a grace more regal yet,We stepped a stately minuet,Each man of us a choice assortmentOf Turveydropian deportment.But where is now your ancient pomp?Your dance is but a vulgar romp,Your shocking "Barns" and "Posts" – oh, fie!You only think of kicking high.The men career sans time, sans rhythm,The girls rush helter-skelter with 'em,They charge, they trample on one's toes,Their elbows hit one on the nose,They black one's eyes, still on they come,They butt one in the back and stom —I mean the waistcoat, till the hallIs more like battlefield than ball.I'd rather serve in the Soudan,I'd rather fight at Omdurman,I'd rather quarrel with a chum,I'd rather face a Rugby scrum,Nay, by the stars, I'd rather beThat hapless wretch, the referee,Most desperate of men, than chanceMy life and limbs at modern dance.

Ball-room Manners

In 1906 the introduction of the "Boston" waltz prompts one of Punch's artists to depict the sad experience of a young lady whose partners had all learned the new dance from American instructors, and who all danced it in a different way. The band, by the way, is playing "The Blue Danube," for Johann Strauss was still a name to conjure with. References to rowdy dancing are frequent in 1907, when Punch printed designs of various costumes to resist the tremendous wear-and-tear of the ballroom, and in 1908, when he suggests, to meet a "long felt want," that a special space should be railed off for "plungers." Punch's picture of the "Borston" as danced in 1909 belies the ironical title "The Poetry of Motion." Long tight skirts were still worn and are a feature of the series of suggestions, made in the same year, by Mr. Baumer for brightening our ballrooms – the Judy-walk, the Apache Polka, the Salome Lancers and the Vampire Valse. That same acute observer of gilded (and painted) youth includes in his burlesque Coronation Procession in 1911 a member of the aristocracy in the guise of a caracoling Bacchante; and in the same year the male dancer craze is satirized in a series of pictures showing the spread of the infection to policemen, railway porters, scavengers, ticket collectors, etc. The revival of old English dances dates from this period, but if Punch is to be trusted, made little impression on Mayfair. Even the most distinguished and eminent politicians did not scorn the dance. Mr. Balfour gave a ball at the height of the season in 1912, and Punch (who was not there) gave the following wholly apocryphal description of the revels: —

ARTHUR'S BALLWhen Parliament, sick with unreason,Was occupied, night after night,With bandying charges of treason,And challenging Ulster to fight,To ease the political tensionPrince Arthur determined to callA truce to this deadly dissensionBy giving a Ball.The guests were by no means confined toThe ranks of the old Upper Ten,For Arthur has always inclined toConsort with all manner of men;So the brainy, though lacking in breeding,Were bidden as well as the fops;The foes of carnivorous feeding,And lovers of chops.There were golfers from Troon and KilspindieDiscussing their favourite greens;Bronzed soldiers from Quetta and Pindi;Pale pilots of flying-machines;There were débutantes visibly flustered,Calm beauties from over the "Pond";Sleek magnates of soap and of mustard,And Brunner and Mond.I saw a delectable DuchessSit out with a Syndicalist,And a battle-scarred soldier on crutchesHob-nob with a Pacificist;And a famous professor of Psychics —A Scot who was reared at Dunkeld —Indulge in the highest of high kicksI ever beheld.Lord Haldane, whose massive proportionsWere gracefully garbed in a kilt,Performed the most daring contortionsWith true Caledonian lilt;Lord Morley resembled a Gracchus;Lloyd George was a genial Jack Cade,And Elibank, beaming like Bacchus,The revels surveyed.The music was subtly compoundedOf melodies famous of yore,And measures that richly aboundedIn modern cacophonous lore;There was Strauss, the adored of Vienna,The genius of joyous unrest,And Strauss, who the shrieks of GehennaContrives to suggest.I'd like to describe, but I canna,The envy combined with dismayAroused by adorable AnnaWhom several Kingdoms obey.Her entry produced quite a crisis —Some prudes were surprised she was axed —She appeared in the costume of IsisAccording to Bakst.It was four of the clock ere I quittedThese scenes of eclectic delight;The fogies had most of them flitted,The revels were still at their height;For Garvin was dancing a Tango,His head in the place of his legs;And Spender a blameless fandangoEncircled by eggs.What incidents happened thereafterI only can dimly surmise:But gusts of ecstatical laughterWent echoing up to the skies;And I know from my own observationThe guests were agreed, one and all,That Arthur united the nationBy giving this Ball.

He: "Very interesting, these Morris-dances. Have you ever seen any before?"

She: "No. I don't even know who Morris was."

Tango-mania

The mention of Anna – the famous Pavlova – was at any rate topical, for the cult of the Russian Ballet was now at its height, and in his Almanack for 1913 Punch exhibited the political and other public celebrities of the hour engaged in appropriate evolutions à la Russe. The "Bunny-hug" was very properly gibbeted in a scathing cartoon, and in his hints to social climbers Punch suggests various styles of vulgar and inane dancing as a passport to notoriety. With laudable fairness he admits, in parallel illustrations, that the Tango of fact was a much less lurid thing than the Tango as painted by the fancy of Puritans; but the revival of afternoon dances and the fashion of "Tango teas" met with no approval, and in the cartoon "Exit Tango," early in 1914, Punch, rather prematurely perhaps, congratulated the "Spirit of Dancing" on the passing of "the tyranny of the dullest of nightmares."

In one of the last of the references to the dancing craze in this period – February, 1914, to be precise —Punch notes, as one of the reasons why the Tango was already démodé, the fact that matrons had taken to it with the utmost fury, after a preliminary stage of acute disapproval. In the words of one of the younger generation: —

Now we may watch our mothers, smiling and flushed and gay,Doing it, doing it, doing it – tangoing night and day.Stamping a Texas Tommy, wreathing a Grapevine Swirl,Gleefully Gaby Gliding, young as the youngest girl.We may not laugh at our mothers, for (between me and you)They can out-dance us often – get all our partners too.

Modern Youth (to Terpsichore): "My hug, I think." Mr. Punch: "My kick, I know!"

Matron v. Maid

This, however, was no new thing. It was only the latest manifestation of a "movement" which runs right through the social history of the whole of this period, and which may be alternatively described as the Emancipation or the Apotheosis of Middle Age. The earliest references to the change link it up with the coming of the New Woman. For example, in 1894, in a "Song of the Twentieth Century," Punch describes the man of the family as relegated to the shelf by his more energetic female relatives: —

Aunt Jane is a popular preacher,Aunt Susan a dealer in stocks,While Father, the gentlest old creature,Attends to the family socks.

But as time goes on it is in the pursuit of pleasure rather than in the sphere of serious effort that the competition of the middle-aged woman is noted as a new and formidable sign of the times. Thus in 1895 we have Du Maurier's picture of the Sunday caller finding that the mother of the family is playing lawn tennis while the young ladies have gone to church. By 1900 the youthfulness of the older generation is made a source of complaint by the juniors. In "Filia Pulchra, Mater Pulchrior," Punch genially arraigns the mothers who "cut out" their daughters. A paper for ladies had declared that the woman of forty was most dangerous to the susceptible male, and Punch enlarges on the theme in "The Rivals," in which an eligible suitor exclaims, "Take, oh take Mamma away!" In 1903 he recurs ironically to the subject in the lines "De Senectute": —

However pedagogues may frownAnd view such dicta with disfavour,The folk who never sober downConfer on life its saltiest savour.The grandmother who wears a capIncurs her family's displeasure;But if she sets a booby-trapAnd wears a fringe, she is a treasure.

The old ideal of growing old gracefully had been superseded by a refusal to grow old at all; and the "unfair competition" of matron with maid is pointedly illustrated in Punch's "Country House Hints" in 1908, where, after giving information about tips, dresses, etc., the writer observes that girls are at a discount as guests: "they are not rich enough for Bridge, and they put a restriction on funny stories." They may have done so fourteen years ago; but only a year later, in a burlesque article based on the fulsome Society paragraphs of the contemporary Press, Punch made it clear that the process of emancipation was proceeding apace: —

Wise mothers – and modern mothers are seldom wanting in astuteness – do not keep their young "flapper" daughters buried in the schoolroom until the day of presentation. They prepare them for their complete emancipation by a series of preliminary canters. Thus they take them to dine at the Fitz or the Tarlton while the hair that is hanging down their backs is still their own…

The upbringing of Lady Sarah Boodle has been wholly unconventional, and as her parents spend most of their time in balloons, she is looking forward to her first season with all the fougue de dix-huit ans. Until she was sixteen Lady Sarah was allowed to read nothing but the Sporting Times and the Statist. This led, not unnaturally, to a violent reaction, and Lady Sarah is now a devoted student of Maeterlinck, Mr. W. B. Yeats and Fiona Macleod. Happily this development has not impaired her healthy enjoyment of Bridge. Last year she won £300 at this winsome pastime… One may fitly conclude this group of winsome English girls with the mention of two beautiful cousins, Lady Phoebe Bunting and Miss Miriam Belshazzar. By an extraordinary coincidence they are both third cousins once removed of Daphne, Lady Saxthorpe, whose coster impersonations were so marked a feature of her late husband's tenure of office as Governor of Hong Kong. Lady Phoebe, strange to say, never learned her alphabet until she was nearly fifteen, while her cousin had mastered the intricacies of compound interest almost before she could walk. Lady Phoebe is a winsome blonde, while Miss Belshazzar is a svelte brunette whose superb Semitic profile recalls the delicious proboscis of her illustrious grandfather, Sir Joshua Schnabelheimer.

Ostentatious Luxury

Extravagant expense and ostentation – another old abomination of Punch's– were not only rife, but they were constantly written up and discussed with a foolish voice of praise in what purported to be democratic papers. A ducal wedding in the mid-'nineties, which was carefully "rehearsed" before it was actually solemnized, caused a veritable explosion in Punch about the columns of matrimonial gush and statistics – the "haystacks of chrysanthemums" – which deluged the papers. In the picture of coroneted sandwichmen engaged by adroit speculators to puff their schemes, Punch in 1897 was only repeating an old indictment of parasitic peers. He had no quarrel with people who took to trade openly and seriously, disregarding the old fine-drawn social distinctions and contempt for commerce – witness his song of "The English Gentleman of the Present Day" in 1899. But he had no welcome for the newfangled newspaper articles on gastronomy, with menus and prices, puffing well-known hotels and restaurants. The statement of a writer in The Times in 1900 that "the necessaries of life may be purchased for £2,000 a year" provided Punch with food for ironical comment. A year later it was seriously maintained in a popular monthly that, from the point of view of a smart Society woman, it was impossible to dress on £1,000 a year. The standard of high living had gone up by leaps and bounds from the days when to Punch's youthful fancy £1,000 a year represented wealth almost beyond the dreams of avarice.

Another old grievance – needless extravagance in the Army – raised its head in 1900, when a correspondent in The Times complained that the latest regulations issued by the War Office were like a tailor's list, and contained details of seventy-seven kinds of gold lace! No wonder was it, as Punch noted, that the fathers of subalterns in crack regiments had to guarantee them a minimum allowance of £600 a year. This was just before the South African war, which immediately led to a general rise of prices – the universal excuse "owing to the war" foreshadowing what took place fifteen years later. Parallels abound, though on a smaller scale. Marriage is ironically declared to be impossible for self-respecting and self-protective girls owing to the dearth of servants. "Like the Dodo, the domestic servant is extinct," and Punch, in his list of suggested exhibits for museums, includes the following: —

Domestic Servant (Mummy). – An extremely rare and finely preserved specimen of a vanished class, whose extinction dates from 1901 a. d. It is therefore of the highest interest to the Anthropologist and the Comparative Anatomist. Its duties are now performed, perhaps more effectively, by the automatic "general" and the electric dumb-waiter. When alive, it commanded the salary of a prima donna, etc.

Aversion from work was already abroad. A fond parent is shown in this year commenting on the recalcitrant attitude of her daughter: "No, she won't work. She never would work. She never will work. There's only one thing – she'll 'ave to go out to service."

Still "smart" Society went on its way unheeding. The increasing publicity of social life is satirized under "Public Passion" in the recital of a young wife who writes: "We are never at home. I believe it is fashionable to go to hospitals now and be ill amongst all sorts and conditions of people." The honeymoon was passing because brides could not face the awful loneliness of a tête-à-tête existence, and welcomed a speedy return to a semi-detached go-as-you-please existence amongst their friends. A week-end honeymoon at Brighton is indicated as the maximum period which could be endured by a modern couple. In fashionable speech inanity began to be replaced by profanity. Unbridled language on the part of aristocrats and smart people led in 1903 to the famous conversational opening of a burlesque Society novel: "'Hell!' said the Duchess, who had hitherto taken no part in the conversation"7– which Punch takes as his text for a discourse upon further developments and reactions. The device of engineering and paying for personal notices in the papers and simultaneously denouncing the scandalous enterprise of pressmen, and the introduction of "freak" parties from America are noticed and reproved in 1903, when amongst other recreations of the Smart Set we read of "Shinty, a wild and tumultuous version of hockey, in which there are absolutely no rules."

The New Mobility

At the beginning of this period bicycling was fashionable. The lines "To Julia, Knight-errant" in 1895 refer in whimsical vein to the brief vogue of bicycling parties by night in the City, organized by "smart" people. Battersea Park was also frequented by fashionable riders; but Punch, with a sure instinct, saw that the craze would not last, and in the same year foreshadowed donkey-riding as the next modish recreation. The advent of "mokestrians" was a mere piece of burlesque, suggested perhaps by the popularity of the sentimental coster song introduced by Mr. Albert Chevalier, but the speedy disestablishment of the bicycle as a fashionable means of locomotion was correctly foretold in one of the latest pictures from the pen of Du Maurier. Here one of a group of fair bicyclists in the Park expresses her ardent desire for the passing of a tyranny which she hated and only obeyed because it was the fashion. Motoring was another matter, because it was expensive and luxurious, and Punch, philosophizing in 1904 on the probable results of a mode of motion which combined speed of transit with the immobility of the passenger, predicted the advent of an obese and voracious "motorocracy" with Gargantuan appetites and mediæval tastes. In a "Ballade of Modern Conversation" which appeared in 1905, the three outstanding topics are Bridge, motors and ailments, and about this time Punch printed a picture of a gentleman who, when asked what was his favourite recreation, replied, "Indigestion."

Future Duke: "What are you goin' to do this mornin' eh?"

Future Earl: "Oh, I dunno. Rot about, I s'pose, as usual."

Future Duke: "Oh, but I say, that's so rotten."

Future Earl: "Well, what else is there to do, you rotter?"

The influence and example of American millionaires is a frequent theme of satire. In 1904 Punch had attacked their acquisitiveness in a burlesque account of the contemplated "bodily removal of certain European landscapes." In 1905 he dealt faithfully with a famous "freak" dinner at the Savoy Hotel, costing £600 a head, when the guests were entertained in a huge gondola and the courtyard was flooded to represent a Venetian lagoon. The American "enfant terrible" in 1907, frankly discussing her relations with her parents, supplies an interesting comment on the complexities of divorce, as described a few years earlier by the late Mr. Henry James in What Maisie Knew. The unemployment and inefficiency of the Upper Classes were admirably satirized in a set of Neo-Chaucerian verses, suggested by a society chronicler who had anticipated a March of the Upper Class unemployed to the East End. In 1906 the Pageant craze assumed formidable dimensions, and the ubiquitous activities of Mr. Louis Napoleon Parker as Pageant-master are duly if disrespectfully acknowledged. Punch had never been enthusiastic about "dressing up"; it was, in his view, foreign to the temper of the British and essentially one of the things which they managed better abroad. Moreover, he regarded this preoccupation with the past as an evasion of our responsibilities to the future. This view is pointedly expressed in the cartoon "Living on Reputation" in 1908, where Britannia (among the Pageants) remarks: "Quite right of them to show pride in my past; but what worries me is that nobody seems to take any interest in my future." "Smart" people were furiously interested in the things of the present, and for the most part in the things that did not matter. From 1906 right up to the war no feature of the feverish pleasure-hunt indulged in by the idle rich escaped the vigilant eye of "Blanche," whose "Letters," when all allowance is made for a spice of exaggeration and for the wit which the author perhaps too generously ascribes to her puppets, remain a substantially faithful picture of the audacious frivolity, the inanity, the rowdiness and the extravagance of England de luxe, unashamed of its folly, yet, at its worst, never inhuman or even arrogant. I don't think that any of "Blanche's" set would have quitted a shooting party because he was asked to drink champagne out of a claret glass, as in the picture of the young super-snob in 1908.

First Owner of Prize Doglet: "These seaside places don't appeal to me the least little bit. But Ozoneville was recommended to give tone to Choo-choo's nerves. He's been suffering from severe shock through seeing two fearful mongrels have a fight in the park one day. Your little thingy-thing's off colour too?"

Second Owner of Prize Doglet: "Yes, a bit run down after the season. Sorry, but I really must hurry away. Band's beginning to play something of Balfe's, and I never allow Ming-ming to hear banal démodé music."

Paint and "Pekies"

Horse-play as an integral part of the modern idea of pleasure is satirized in 1910 in a series of suggestions for new "Side-shows" at Exhibitions, which should combine the maximum amount of motion, discomfort, and even danger to life and limb. The recrudescence of "beauty doctors" is noted by "Blanche" in the same year, and the increasing use of paint, not to repair the ravages of age, but to lend additional lustre to the bloom of youth, is faithfully recorded by Punch's artists in the decade before the war. Bridge – to which Punch had paid a negative homage on the ground that it kept the drawing-room ballad-monger and the parlour-tricksters at bay – had ousted whist, and in 1913 was threatened by "Coon-Can." On the cult of the "Peky-Peky" Punch spoke with two voices, for while he deprecated the infatuation of their owners, he was fully alive to the charm, the intelligence, and the courage of these picturesque little Orientals.

Extravagance invariably leads to reaction; but in this period the reactions were not always sincere – at least not among the "Smart Set." They intermittently played at being serious, but the motive generally savoured of materialism: they were more concerned with conserving their bodies than with saving their souls. It was an age of new and strange Diets and Cures and food-fads. Punch's "Health Seeker's Vade Mecum" in 1893 reflects modern pessimism and uncertainty. In 1904, in "Our Doctors," he recalls Mr. Gladstone's tribute to Sir Andrew Clark, but his appreciation and eulogy of medical worthies was a good deal discounted by his linking the names of Jenner and Gull with those of Morell Mackenzie and Robson Roose. Neurotics were now to be found in unexpected quarters. In 1899 Phil May has a picture of an admiral kept awake all night by a butterfly that went flopping about his room.

The movement for learning "First Aid" had already become fashionable – and to that extent futile – and in 1901, in "Courtship à la Galton," Punch mildly satirizes the creed of Eugenics, as illustrated by the union of two Galtonites, despising sentiment, but possessing diplomas of matrimonial fitness. Romance and Hygiene seldom go hand-in-hand. The "Simple Life" was another favourite cult and catchword; but its votaries were for the most part "affecting to seem unaffected."

Smart Simplicity

American visitors flooded London for the Coronation of 1902, and Punch makes good play with a statement in a weekly review that "the old-world simplicity of rural life is unique and has an unfailing charm for our Transatlantic visitors." This was and is true of the best of them, but Punch turned the announcement to legitimate ridicule in "Arcady, Ltd.," with its "faked" rusticity, carefully rehearsed and organized to cater for the taste of wealthy explorers. The cry of "Back to the Land" is illustrated in the futile efforts of fashionables pretending to assist in the harvest field: it is ironically commended in 1906 to exhausted débutantes as the best form of cure for the fatigues of the London season. The "Simple Life," as practised by well-to-do dyspeptics and the unindustrious rich, was in his view a complete fraud, for they were really preoccupied with the material side of existence. Hence the adoption of weird unknown foods and clothing. In 1910 "Blanche" gives us to understand that the craze for abstinence had even invaded the "Smart Set": —

A good many people are going in for the No-food cult, the Dick Flummerys among others. Indeed, dinners and suppers seem to be by way of becoming extinct functions. Dick says that till you've been without food for a week you don't know what you're really capable of. I don't think that would be a very reassuring thing to hear from anyone looking as wild and haggard as Dick does now, if one happened to be tête-à-tête with, him and some knives! Dotty tells me that, with their tiny house and small means, they find entertaining much easier now they belong to the No-food set. Their little rooms will hold twice as many no-fooders as ordinary people, she says, and then there's no expense of feeding 'em. No, indeed. At the Flummerys', when your partner asks, "What shall I get you?" he merely adds, "Hot or cold water?"

In general, however, these rigours were confined to intellectual or pseudo-intellectual coteries, of which a good representative is to be found in the hatless and sandalled youth depicted in May, 1912 – not unnaturally classed as a tramp by the old Highland shepherd – who evidently belongs to the type ingeniously described as that of the "Herbaceous Boarder." In 1913, in "a chronicle of Cures, with the Biography of a Survivor," Punch briefly traces the progress of fads in food, drink and hygiene in the past half-century. He begins with light sherry, goes on with Gladstone claret, deviates into the water cure, takes to whisky and soda, then to cocoa nibs, and winds up with paraffin. Simultaneously and successively the survivor abandons "prime cuts" for vegetarianism; relapses to carnivorous habits under the auspices of Salisbury (the apostle of half-cooked beef and hot-water) and Fletcher (who found salvation in chewing); then took to Plasmon with Eustace Miles, lactobacilline in accordance with the prescription of Metchnikoff, and finally developed into a full-blown disciple of osteopathy. The list is not by any means complete, for no mention is made of Dr. Haig or of China tea, or the uncooked vegetable cure. But it will serve as a rough survey of the romance and reality of modern dietetics.