There has been no denunciation, and perhaps even no recognition, of a
certain social immorality in the caricature of the mid-century and
earlier. Literary and pictorial alike, it had for its aim the
vulgarizing of the married woman. No one now would read Douglas Jerrold
for pleasure, but it is worth while to turn up that humourist's serial,
"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures," which were presumably considered good
comic reading in the "Punch" of that time, and to make acquaintance with
a certain ideal of the grotesque. Obviously to make a serious comment on
anything which others consider or have considered humorous is to put
oneself at a disadvantage. He who sees the joke holds himself somewhat
the superior of the man who would see it, such as it is, if he thought it
worth his eyesight. The last-named has to bear the least tolerable of
modern reproaches--that he lacks humour; but he need not always care. Now
to turn over Douglas Jerrold's monologues is to find that people in the
mid-century took their mirth principally from the life of the _arriere
boutique_. On that shabby stage was enacted the comedy of literature.
Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as a
circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted. But the essential
vulgarity is that of the woman. There is in some old "Punch" volume a
drawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing named the gentle, the
refined--where the work of the artist has vied with the spirit of the
letterpress. Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech of
her stays. They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond description gross. And
page by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her
foolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that time
there was, moreover, one great humourist, one whom I infinitely admire;
he, too, I am grieved to remember, bore his part willingly in vulgarizing
the woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarizing of the act
of maternity. Woman spiteful, woman suing man at the law for evading her
fatuous companionship, woman incoherent, woman abandoned without
restraint to violence and temper, woman feigning sensibility--in none of
these ignominies is woman so common and so foolish for Dickens as she is
in child-bearing.
I named Leech but now. He was, in all things essential, Dickens's
contemporary. And accordingly the married woman and her child are
humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly. For him she is
moderately and dully ridiculous. What delights him as humorous is that
her husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of her, finds
the time long, and tries to escape her. It amuses him that she should
furtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the annoyance of her
husband, and that her husband should have no desire to adorn her, and
that her mother should be intolerable. It pleases him that her baby,
with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its hat--a burlesque
baby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for that too makes subtly
for her abasement. Charles Keene, again--another contemporary, though he
lived into a later and different time. He saw little else than common
forms of human ignominy--indignities of civic physique, of stupid
prosperity, of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greater
proportion than he found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or
by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not
sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered
with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain
sensitiveness of apprehension in the designer; and then again we get
convinced that real apprehension--real apprehensiveness--would not have
insisted upon such things, could not have lived with them through almost
a whole career. There is one drawing in the "Punch" of years ago, in
which Charles Keene achieved the nastiest thing possible to even the
invention of that day. A drunken citizen, in the usual broadcloth, has
gone to bed, fully dressed, with his boots on and his umbrella open, and
the joke lies in the surprise awaiting, when she awakes, the wife asleep
at his side in a night-cap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine
how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across
the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene
drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity,
ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old
common jape against the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in one
drawing a bridegroom with shambling side-long legs asks his bride if she
is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, "No, never was." In all
these things there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was
in the figures of his schoolboys. The hint of tenderness which in really
fine work could never be absent from a man's thought of a child or from
his touch of one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand, is
absolutely lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless, we acknowledge that
there is humour. It is also in some of his clerical figures when they
are not caricatures, and certainly in "Robert," the City waiter of
"Punch." But so irresistible is the derision of the woman that all
Charles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally upon
her. Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered, never for the
social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but always for
her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man upon whom she spies
and in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights. If this is the shopkeeper
the possession of whom is her boast, what then is she?
This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the
Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular form
of human disgrace--has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which
some men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereas a silly man is
not reproached through his sex. But the vulgarity of which I have
written here was distinctively English--the most English thing that
England had in days when she bragged of many another--and it was not able
to survive an increased commerce of manners and letters with France. It
was the chief immorality destroyed by the French novel.