MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed. Words printed in italics are noted with underscores: _italics_. [Illustration: THE RECONCILIATION: OR, AS IT OUGHT TO BE Reproduced from the cartoon in _Punch_, 15th March, 1845.] MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND By CHARLES L. GRAVES IN FOUR VOLUMES VOL. I.--1841-1857 CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 1921 _Published by arrangement with the Proprietors of "Punch"_ PREFACE The title of this work indicates at once its main source and its limitations. The files of _Punch_ have been generally admitted to be a valuable mine of information on the manners, customs, and fashions of the Victorian age, and of the wealth of material thus provided liberal use has been made. But it must not be forgotten that _Punch_ has always been a London paper, and that in so far as English life is reflected in his pages, London always comes first, though in this volume, and especially during the "Hungry 'Forties," Lancashire comes a very good second. For pictures of provincial society--such, for example, as that given in _Cranford_ or in the novels of Trollope--or of life in Edinburgh or Dublin, the chronicler of Victorian England must look outside _Punch_. The "country cousin" is not forgotten, but for the most part comes into view when he is on a visit to London, not when he is on his native heath. Yet even with these deductions the amount of material is embarrassingly rich. And this is due not only to the multiplicity of subjects treated, but to the manner in which they were discussed. Of _Punch_, in his early days at any rate, the criticism recently applied to Victorian writers in general by a writer in _Blackwood_ holds good: "They had a great deal to say, and they said it sometimes in too loud a voice. Such was their virtue, to which their vice was akin. Their vice was the vice of rhetoric. They fell to the temptation of many words. They wrote too often as the tub-thumper speaks, without much self-criticism and with a too fervent desire to be heard immediately and at all costs." In the 'forties _Punch_ doubled the rôles of jester and political pamphleteer, and in the latter capacity indulged in a great deal of vehement partisan rhetoric. The loudest, the most passionate and moving as well as the least judicial of his spokesmen was Douglas Jerrold. The choice of dividing lines between periods must always be somewhat artificial, but I was confirmed in my decision to end the first volume with the year of the Indian Mutiny by the fact that it coincided with the death of Douglas Jerrold, who from 1841 to 1857 had, more than any other writer, been responsible for the Radical and humanitarian views expressed in _Punch_.