Mr. Punch's History of Modem England
by . New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. 1921. Four vols. [Vol. I (1841 - 1857) and vol. II (1857-1874), now published; vols. III and IV to be published in the spring of 1922.] 8vo, x+314 and 349 pp. Illustrated. $10.00.
WHEN Mr. M. H. Spielmann, in 1895, published his excellent History of ‘Punch,' he reproduced ‘no more pictures from Punch than were rendered necessary by the topics under discussion.’ preferring to ‘send the reader, for Punch’s pictures, to the ever-fresh pages of Punch itselt.’ For American readers, however, to whom Punch has always been a strangely serious magazine, read without the roars of laughter which seem to have greeted it in England, its ‘ever-fresh pages’ have badly needed an experienced critic and guide, competent to explain the sources and nature of its humor and allusions. Such a friend Mr. Graves really is; and his choice of pictures, verses, and skits is so good that there is scarcely one which is not in some way amusing or interesting.
Punch humor, to Americans who see only an occasional number, has often seemed heavy, forced, or over-loaded. We cannot see why a piece of excellent satire should so often be spoiled by explanatory additions of self-conscious comment. A picture, for example, shows a haughty dowager, seated regally in a landau, talking to a farmer and his wife, standing in the door of their poor cottage; and the following is subjoined:
GRATEFUL RECIPIENT. Bless you, my lady! May we meet in heaven!
HAUGHTY DONOR. Good gracious! ! Drive on, Jarvis! ! !
(She had evidently read Dr. Johnson, who ‘did n’t want to meet certain people anywhere.’)
The comment explains the joke.
And yet, as a matter of fact, such gratuities are by no means common, and they can, moreover, be matched in American pictures of the same date. What is more important is that this cartoon, with numberless others, was directed against a vice of the age, and that Punch’s championship of children, servants, governesses, chorus-girls, climbing boys, crossing-sweepers, seamstresses, and all victims of sweating, was so persistent that it leaves the reader with a glow of gratitude that condones all stupidities and all mistakes of policy, like his treatment of Peel and Lincoln. This book, by grouping the cartoons and skits in chapters under special headings, makes startlingly dear the essential seriousness that has always underlain his facetiousness.
Taken in conjunction with Spielmann’s History, these volumes give the general reader about all he is likely to wish to have of the famous periodical. But Mr. Graves’s book is much more than a reprint: it is a history of Victorian England, its politics, religious controversy, manners, fashions and fads, education, sports and pastimes, literature and art, all seen from the angle of satire, travesty, cartoon, caricature, and grotesque. ‘The great value of Punch,' says the author, ‘resides in the fact that he provides us with a history of the Victorians written by themselves’; and it is perhaps not fanciful to add that ‘he’ is a fortunate survival, in modern times, of a popular and largely anonymous art, like that of the Middle Ages, by means of which a whole people has recorded its daily life with a detail, accuracy, and humor such as the professional historian cannot compass. Mr. Punch’s History would make a fine textbook of the Victorian era, if some teacher were brave enough to adopt it.
ROBERT M. GAY.