The success of "Tom Brown" (Tom Hughes), who was elected for Lambeth in 1865, encouraged the enthusiastic friends of the British workman in the hope that he would now be painted without fear or favour, but Tom Brown's honest unvarnished portraiture was more than his sitter could stand:-- While a fact is a fact 'twill do no good to blink it, Put up with the shadows Tom Brown dares to show, Your face may be darker than you like to think it, If the shadows ain't fast, wash, and let's see them go. While your Union pickets still waylay and "ratten" The knob-sticks, who work on their own honest hook, While on your hard earnings strike-delegates batten, And machines and machine-work are in your black book; While men who earn more by the week than their curate Are content in one room of a hovel to pig; While shop-drinks and Saint Monday their old rate endure at, And the wife and the young 'uns come after the swig; While limb's rest and soul's light to your infants begrudging, You drive them to workshop, to mine, loom or wheel, To drag through long years of unnatural drudging As though minds could die out, and yet bodies not feel; While such are the shadows your features that darken, Needs must that the blacks in your picture appear; And they're no friends who bid you your own praises hearken, When an honest fault-finder is craving your ear! Later on, however, Tom Brown was himself taken to task for flattering the working man. On the question of housing and sanitation _Punch_ refused to believe that landlords were altogether to blame. Social reformers and legislators found themselves up against stubborn facts, and none were more stubborn than the Briton's prejudices in favour of vested rights and a man's house being his own castle, wherein he is free to do what he likes with his own:-- These stubborn facts are, no doubt, at the bottom of much that is worthy of respect in John Bull's character. They have not a little to do with his Magna Charta and his Habeas Corpus. But they occasionally stop the way all the same; obstruct the efforts of the Local Board or Nuisance Removal Committee, crouch like lions in the path of the Officer of Health, trip up the heels of the Inspector of Nuisances, and crop out in back slums, by-lanes, and blind alleys for district visitors and zealous clergymen to break their shins over. [Sidenote: _Village Sanitation in 1865_]