DOI Heft:
May 16, 1857
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.16619#0200
192
PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.
[May 16, 1857.
connubial four-poster among the pack; or Captain Blunderbore's
card—the most tiny and lady-like square of glazed paste-board, with
letters so small, they almost require the help of a magnifying glass to
make them out; or Lady Mangelwurzel's solid and substantial
ticket, heavy as her ladyship's jointure, the letters square as her
bank-account, and as firmly impressed on the paper as her ladyship's
dignity and importance on her mind. Here is the pasteboard repre-
sentative of lively Mrs. Marabout—limp, light, spider-charactered,
engraved in Paris; and here medieevally-minded Mr. Pyxon has
stamped himself in Gothic characters as difficult _ to decipher as the
directions to strangers in the New Houses of Parliament.
" But what is the meaning of this pack of pasteboard from the Jug-
gernauts ? Why has Mr. Juggernaut left two cards, and Mrs.
Juggernaut two cards, and Miss Juggernaut two cards, and Mr.
Frederick Juggernaut two cards f And why are theyall turned up
at one corner ? The Juggernauts are the most determined doers of
social penance I know. This shower of cards is meant to represent a
visit from every individual member of their family to every individual
member of mine. Well, if it have saved us from an infliction of the
Juggernauts in person, let us be thankful. These paste-board proxies
are blessed inventions, after all. There could be only one thing better.
To get rid of the printed paste-board—even as we have got rid of the
human buckram it represents. Why call upon each other—O my
brethren and sisters—you who bore me—you whom I bore—even in
paste-board ? Why not drop it altogether—and live apart ? People
who care for each other will find time and opportunity to meet, I will
answer for it. Why should those who do not pine in a self-inflicted and
superfluous suffering? Think what you are exposing yourselves and
me to. I or my wife might be at home when you call. We might all
have to endure half-an-hour of each other—a constrained, unhappy
half-hour, of baffled attempts at keeping our mask from slipping on one
side, and showing the yawns, and fiat melancholy behind them.
" Then this penance is not merely painful in itself. It costs time and
money.
" One morning in every three weeks or so, I find my wife at her
writing-table, struggling with the Red-book and the Map of London.
She is making out her lists of calls, she tells me. These lists are in
duplicate. One is for her own guidance, the other for the driver of
the Brougham, which is hired for the day's penance. There is a
sovereign for that, including the tip to the driver. Of course, she
can't be expected to make her calls in a cab.
"I once, out of curiosity, accompanied my unhappy wife on one of
these penal rounds of hers. I never saw more suffering,_ of various
kinds, condensed into six hours. Pirst, there is the consideration of
the route—by what line the greatest number of calls could be got
through in the least time, with the greatest economy of ground. This
settled with the driver, begins the painful process itself, in Tyburnia
—let us say—or Belgravia, or the regions around Bedford Square—
if one dare own to acquaintances in that quarter,
" Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow."
"You reach No. 1 on your list: a pull at the check-string : ten to one
the driver has overshot the door: he turns round: descends : knocks :
the door is opened : ' Mrs. Harris not at home '—of course : your
cards are dropped: drive on to No. 2: driver has a difficulty about
the street: this you discuss and finally settle with him through the
front window : drive a hundred yards : check-string again: knock:
door opened: not at home : card dropped as before : then on to No. 3 :
and so the weary routine goes on from one o'clock till six. Of course,
there are episodes of peculiar dreariness. Sometimes Mrs. Harris is
at home, and being at home, has neglected to say that she is not. If
you have rashly asked the formal question, you must go in, and^ the
paste-board performance is turned into the real penance of a bond-fide
call. Or your coachman is stupid, and keeps turning up wrong streets :
or cannot read, and invariably stops at the wrong numbers : or is
obstinate, and has a theory of his own as to the order in which the
houses on your list are to be taken, and so forth.
" The worst of all, as I have already said, is when the people called
upon happen to be at home. This chance has to be faced at every
house, and adds seriously to the day's unhappiness. I shall not soon
forget my wife's face of consternation when, on dropping her cards at
the address of our dreary old friend, Mrs. Boreham, who is at once
deaf, curious, and ill-natured—the servant who took the cards, instead
of shutting the door as usual, advanced to the carriage—' Good Gra-
cious !' exclaimed my wife, in a voice of dismay, ' She's at home !' _
" ' Mrs. Boreham at home ?' she inquired the next moment, with
the blandest smile.
" ' No, Ma'am,' was the answer; ' but she told me to say, if you
called, she was going to Brighton for a month.'
" ' God bless her!' rapped out my wife. The footman thought the
ejaculation one of pious affection. "Under this impression he_ might
well look astonished. Had he understood the words in their true
sense—as an utterance of thankfulness that his mistress was out of the
way,—he would, probably, have said ' Amen,' for Mrs. B.'s hand is
heavy on her household. I have never joined my wife in a day of
calling-penance since that morning. But I am always paying bills for
packs of cards, and the Brougham forms a serious item in our quarterly
accounts.
"But after all it is not so much the waste of money and time that
irritates one as the hollowness of the business. If these lying paste-
boards must be^deposited, why not despatch them by post, like trades-
men's circulars ? 1 hear that some fine ladies do send round their maids
on this penance. I applaud them for it. I have serious thoughts of
insisting on my wife's employing the crossing-sweeper—who does our
confidential errands extraordinary—to deliver her cards. He is a
most trustworthy man, and would be thankful for the day's work, for
which he might be fitted out respectably in one of my old suits.
"This Groan, I feel, ought by rights to have come not from me, but
from my wife. It is the poor women especially who have to do this
enance. But we men suffer from it in twenty ways, besides the
irect ones of money out of pocket, and a wife's time abstracted from
home and home duties. The huge lie it embodies works all through
society. This paste-board acquaintance invites and is invited. To
it I owe the splendid dulness of many dinners every season—the
heat and weariness of many crushes under the name of drums, routs,
concerts, and so forth—the necessity of bowing and smiling to, and
professing a sort of interest in the concerns of hundreds of people I
don't care a rap for. Thanks to it, in short, I perform an uncounted
number of journeys in that prison-van I have already alluded to, in
whose stifling cells we most of us pass so much of our unhappy lives,
on our way, self-condemned that we are, to hard labour on the Social
Tread-mill.
"When shall we have the courage to put down this instrument of
torture, as we have had the good sense to abolish its infinitely less
heart-breaking prison-equivalent ?
" I am, Mr. Punch,
" Yours, respectfully,
" A Sufferer."
LEGAL NEWS.
{From the " Law Times.")
Waterloo Bridge has been seized—taken in execution for taxes.
When we heard this, we feared that it must always remain in captivity,
for that noble and solid structure never evinced the least inclination
to settle. However, the matter was arranged, and an action for
trespass is to be brought; for though there could be no objection to
the bailiffs or any one else laying hold of the balustrades, piers are privi-
leged from arrest. There is some difficulty about the form of proceeding,
for one end of the bridge abuts on Surrey, which would seem to indi-
cate a plea of Surrebutter as the remedy, while the general nature of
the case points to the Court of the Arches. The passengers who were
on the bridge at the time of its seizure, were taken as live-stock, but
have, we understand, been replevied, except Mr. Wm. Williams, M.P.,
who was crossing, and who insisted upon being taken at a valuation,
which, being his own, was found so exorbitant, that no terms could be
come to, and at a late hour of the night the honourable member was
swopped for a donkey, which a respectable costermonger was riding, a
bargain conceived to be so beneficial to the bridge owners, that the
gain on this transaction alone will defray all the expense of the trial
at law.
Wordy and Verdi.
A Musical purist says :—" We have already had Verdi's music
without the words, but I think if we could now have a Concert of
Verdi's words without the music, that it would be much more popular,
and infinitely more musical, of the two!" We all know the Maw-
worm-like love that Exeter Hall cherishes for unpopularity, or else
that Temple of Hypocrisy would take a few concerted measures to
carry out the above notion.
"sequiturque nelson haud passibus jEQUIS."
Admiral Horatio Nelson (of the Nile) in one of his last letters on
shore, says, in reference to tactics, " I always endeavour to inculcate
the doctrine—Get Close." Admiral Charles Napier (of South-
wark) in laudable compliance with this injunction, has got so close
that, according to certain complainants in the police court, he won't
even pay for his election cabs.
Thereby Hangs a Tail.
The "Edinburgh Review has transferred its Whig fealty from John
Russell to Palmerston. This is not fickleness, but mere trade com-
petition. The Quarterly, last time, had a good article on Rats, which
was applauded, so now the Edinburgh comes out all Rat.
PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.
[May 16, 1857.
connubial four-poster among the pack; or Captain Blunderbore's
card—the most tiny and lady-like square of glazed paste-board, with
letters so small, they almost require the help of a magnifying glass to
make them out; or Lady Mangelwurzel's solid and substantial
ticket, heavy as her ladyship's jointure, the letters square as her
bank-account, and as firmly impressed on the paper as her ladyship's
dignity and importance on her mind. Here is the pasteboard repre-
sentative of lively Mrs. Marabout—limp, light, spider-charactered,
engraved in Paris; and here medieevally-minded Mr. Pyxon has
stamped himself in Gothic characters as difficult _ to decipher as the
directions to strangers in the New Houses of Parliament.
" But what is the meaning of this pack of pasteboard from the Jug-
gernauts ? Why has Mr. Juggernaut left two cards, and Mrs.
Juggernaut two cards, and Miss Juggernaut two cards, and Mr.
Frederick Juggernaut two cards f And why are theyall turned up
at one corner ? The Juggernauts are the most determined doers of
social penance I know. This shower of cards is meant to represent a
visit from every individual member of their family to every individual
member of mine. Well, if it have saved us from an infliction of the
Juggernauts in person, let us be thankful. These paste-board proxies
are blessed inventions, after all. There could be only one thing better.
To get rid of the printed paste-board—even as we have got rid of the
human buckram it represents. Why call upon each other—O my
brethren and sisters—you who bore me—you whom I bore—even in
paste-board ? Why not drop it altogether—and live apart ? People
who care for each other will find time and opportunity to meet, I will
answer for it. Why should those who do not pine in a self-inflicted and
superfluous suffering? Think what you are exposing yourselves and
me to. I or my wife might be at home when you call. We might all
have to endure half-an-hour of each other—a constrained, unhappy
half-hour, of baffled attempts at keeping our mask from slipping on one
side, and showing the yawns, and fiat melancholy behind them.
" Then this penance is not merely painful in itself. It costs time and
money.
" One morning in every three weeks or so, I find my wife at her
writing-table, struggling with the Red-book and the Map of London.
She is making out her lists of calls, she tells me. These lists are in
duplicate. One is for her own guidance, the other for the driver of
the Brougham, which is hired for the day's penance. There is a
sovereign for that, including the tip to the driver. Of course, she
can't be expected to make her calls in a cab.
"I once, out of curiosity, accompanied my unhappy wife on one of
these penal rounds of hers. I never saw more suffering,_ of various
kinds, condensed into six hours. Pirst, there is the consideration of
the route—by what line the greatest number of calls could be got
through in the least time, with the greatest economy of ground. This
settled with the driver, begins the painful process itself, in Tyburnia
—let us say—or Belgravia, or the regions around Bedford Square—
if one dare own to acquaintances in that quarter,
" Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow."
"You reach No. 1 on your list: a pull at the check-string : ten to one
the driver has overshot the door: he turns round: descends : knocks :
the door is opened : ' Mrs. Harris not at home '—of course : your
cards are dropped: drive on to No. 2: driver has a difficulty about
the street: this you discuss and finally settle with him through the
front window : drive a hundred yards : check-string again: knock:
door opened: not at home : card dropped as before : then on to No. 3 :
and so the weary routine goes on from one o'clock till six. Of course,
there are episodes of peculiar dreariness. Sometimes Mrs. Harris is
at home, and being at home, has neglected to say that she is not. If
you have rashly asked the formal question, you must go in, and^ the
paste-board performance is turned into the real penance of a bond-fide
call. Or your coachman is stupid, and keeps turning up wrong streets :
or cannot read, and invariably stops at the wrong numbers : or is
obstinate, and has a theory of his own as to the order in which the
houses on your list are to be taken, and so forth.
" The worst of all, as I have already said, is when the people called
upon happen to be at home. This chance has to be faced at every
house, and adds seriously to the day's unhappiness. I shall not soon
forget my wife's face of consternation when, on dropping her cards at
the address of our dreary old friend, Mrs. Boreham, who is at once
deaf, curious, and ill-natured—the servant who took the cards, instead
of shutting the door as usual, advanced to the carriage—' Good Gra-
cious !' exclaimed my wife, in a voice of dismay, ' She's at home !' _
" ' Mrs. Boreham at home ?' she inquired the next moment, with
the blandest smile.
" ' No, Ma'am,' was the answer; ' but she told me to say, if you
called, she was going to Brighton for a month.'
" ' God bless her!' rapped out my wife. The footman thought the
ejaculation one of pious affection. "Under this impression he_ might
well look astonished. Had he understood the words in their true
sense—as an utterance of thankfulness that his mistress was out of the
way,—he would, probably, have said ' Amen,' for Mrs. B.'s hand is
heavy on her household. I have never joined my wife in a day of
calling-penance since that morning. But I am always paying bills for
packs of cards, and the Brougham forms a serious item in our quarterly
accounts.
"But after all it is not so much the waste of money and time that
irritates one as the hollowness of the business. If these lying paste-
boards must be^deposited, why not despatch them by post, like trades-
men's circulars ? 1 hear that some fine ladies do send round their maids
on this penance. I applaud them for it. I have serious thoughts of
insisting on my wife's employing the crossing-sweeper—who does our
confidential errands extraordinary—to deliver her cards. He is a
most trustworthy man, and would be thankful for the day's work, for
which he might be fitted out respectably in one of my old suits.
"This Groan, I feel, ought by rights to have come not from me, but
from my wife. It is the poor women especially who have to do this
enance. But we men suffer from it in twenty ways, besides the
irect ones of money out of pocket, and a wife's time abstracted from
home and home duties. The huge lie it embodies works all through
society. This paste-board acquaintance invites and is invited. To
it I owe the splendid dulness of many dinners every season—the
heat and weariness of many crushes under the name of drums, routs,
concerts, and so forth—the necessity of bowing and smiling to, and
professing a sort of interest in the concerns of hundreds of people I
don't care a rap for. Thanks to it, in short, I perform an uncounted
number of journeys in that prison-van I have already alluded to, in
whose stifling cells we most of us pass so much of our unhappy lives,
on our way, self-condemned that we are, to hard labour on the Social
Tread-mill.
"When shall we have the courage to put down this instrument of
torture, as we have had the good sense to abolish its infinitely less
heart-breaking prison-equivalent ?
" I am, Mr. Punch,
" Yours, respectfully,
" A Sufferer."
LEGAL NEWS.
{From the " Law Times.")
Waterloo Bridge has been seized—taken in execution for taxes.
When we heard this, we feared that it must always remain in captivity,
for that noble and solid structure never evinced the least inclination
to settle. However, the matter was arranged, and an action for
trespass is to be brought; for though there could be no objection to
the bailiffs or any one else laying hold of the balustrades, piers are privi-
leged from arrest. There is some difficulty about the form of proceeding,
for one end of the bridge abuts on Surrey, which would seem to indi-
cate a plea of Surrebutter as the remedy, while the general nature of
the case points to the Court of the Arches. The passengers who were
on the bridge at the time of its seizure, were taken as live-stock, but
have, we understand, been replevied, except Mr. Wm. Williams, M.P.,
who was crossing, and who insisted upon being taken at a valuation,
which, being his own, was found so exorbitant, that no terms could be
come to, and at a late hour of the night the honourable member was
swopped for a donkey, which a respectable costermonger was riding, a
bargain conceived to be so beneficial to the bridge owners, that the
gain on this transaction alone will defray all the expense of the trial
at law.
Wordy and Verdi.
A Musical purist says :—" We have already had Verdi's music
without the words, but I think if we could now have a Concert of
Verdi's words without the music, that it would be much more popular,
and infinitely more musical, of the two!" We all know the Maw-
worm-like love that Exeter Hall cherishes for unpopularity, or else
that Temple of Hypocrisy would take a few concerted measures to
carry out the above notion.
"sequiturque nelson haud passibus jEQUIS."
Admiral Horatio Nelson (of the Nile) in one of his last letters on
shore, says, in reference to tactics, " I always endeavour to inculcate
the doctrine—Get Close." Admiral Charles Napier (of South-
wark) in laudable compliance with this injunction, has got so close
that, according to certain complainants in the police court, he won't
even pay for his election cabs.
Thereby Hangs a Tail.
The "Edinburgh Review has transferred its Whig fealty from John
Russell to Palmerston. This is not fickleness, but mere trade com-
petition. The Quarterly, last time, had a good article on Rats, which
was applauded, so now the Edinburgh comes out all Rat.