The Cynical View:—Wherever there is mischief, women are sure to be at the bottom of it. The state of the country bears out this old saying. All our difficulties arise from a superabundance of females. The only remedy for this evil is to pack up bag and baggage, and start them away.
The Alarmist View:—If the surplus female population with which we are overrun increases much more, we shall be eaten up with women. What used to be our better half will soon become our worse nine-tenths; a numerical majority which it will be vain to contend with, and which will reduce our free and glorious constitution to that most degrading of all despotisms, a petticoat government.
Our Own View:—It is lamentable that thousands of poor girls should starve here upon slops, working for slopsellers, and only not dying old maids because dying young, when stalwart mates and solid meals might be found for all in Australia. Doubtless they would fly as fast as the Swedish hen-chaffinches—if only they had the means of flying. It remains with the Government and the country to find them wings.
The Worm Turns
Punch's chivalry to women is beyond question, but it was not untempered by a certain condescension. Throughout these years—with rare exceptions—he remains faithful to the old assumption that no woman could have a sense of humour. Grown-up sisters are frequently represented as being unmercifully chaffed by small brothers without apparently having the slightest power of effectual rejoinder. And this defect is shown in the pictures, where the women are exceedingly pleasant to look at, but nearly always quite expressionless. Yet in moments of generous expansion Punch was capable of crediting them with extremely damaging criticism of their lords and masters. The high-water mark of his sympathy with female emancipation in these years is to be found in the homely remonstrances of "Mrs. Mouser" in "A Bit of my Mind":—
… Well, the hypocrisy of men all over the world, especially the civilized!—for, after all, the savages are really and truly more of the gentlemen. They mean what they say to the sex, and act up to it; they don't call the suffering creatures lilies, and roses, and angels, and jewels of life, and then treat 'em as if they were weeds of the world, and pebbles of the highway. But with civilized nations—as I fling it at Mouser—they all of 'em make women the sign-post pictures of everything that's beautiful and behave to the dear originals as if they were born simpletons. "Look at Liberty, Mr. Mouser," said I, "look, you want to make Liberty look as lovely as it can be done, and what do you do? Why, you're obliged to come to women for the only beautiful Liberty that will serve you. You paint and stamp Liberty as a woman, and then—but it's so like you—then you won't suffer so much as a single petticoat to take her seat in the House of Commons. And next, Mouser"—for I would be heard—"and next, you want the figure of Justice. Woman again. There she is, with her balance and sword, as the sort of public-house sign for law, but—is a poor woman allowed to wear false hair, and put a black gown upon her back, and so much as once open her mouth on the Queen's Bench? May she put a tippet of ermine on herself—may she even find herself in a jury? Oh, no: you can paint Justice, and cut her in stone, but you never let the poor thing say a syllable."
"Are you going?"
"Why, ye-es. The fact is that your party is so slow and I am weally so infernally bored, that I shall go somewhere and smoke a quiet cigar."
"Well, good-night. As you are by no means handsome, a great puppy, and not in the least amusing, I think it is the best thing you can do."
25. Miss Blackwell, as we learn from an In Memoriam notice in The Times, was born in Bristol on February 3, 1821, died at Hastings in 1910, and was buried at Kilmun, Argyllshire. She is there described as "the first woman doctor."
26. The stage name of Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, daughter of an English officer, born at Limerick in 1818, the favourite of the old King Ludwig of Bavaria; dancer, actress, author, lecturer, who died in New York "sincerely penitent" in 1861.
27. See the Examiner and Punch. The following advertisement in the Examiner will be read with interest:—"The arrival of Mrs. Beecher-Stowe has given an impetus to the demand for all Stephen Glover's compositions connected with Uncle Tom: 'The Sea of Glass,' Eliza's song 'Sleep, our child,' 'Eva's Parting Words,' and Topsy's song 'I'm but a little nigger girl.'"
FASHION IN DRESS
It is a noteworthy sign of the times that between 1841 and 1857 the specific references to the dress of men in the text of Punch are much more numerous than those dealing with the vagaries of female attire. The balance inclines in the contrary direction in the pictures which, when tested by old daguerreotypes and the contents of family albums, form a substantially correct and illuminating commentary on the evolution of fashion in women's dress. So we begin with the ladies, with the double proviso that Leech and Doyle and their brother artists on Punch were not fashion-plate designers, and that the charms and extravagances of the modish world which they depicted were drawn mainly from the Metropolis. Punch was a Londoner, even a Cockney, and throws little light on the social life of the provinces.
The Breadth of the Fashion
EASIER SAID THAN DONE
Master of the House: "Oh, Fred, my boy—when dinner is ready, you take Mrs. Furbelow downstairs!"
GRAND CHARGE OF PERAMBULATORS—AND DEFEAT OF SWELLS
ILLUSTRATION FROM AN UNPUBLISHED NOVEL
Aids to Beauty
To speak roughly, fashion in women's dress is subject to two great alternating influences—in the direction of elongation or of lateral extension. In the 'forties and 'fifties the tendency was steadily in the second direction and away from the slim elegance which has been the aim of the modistes of recent years. Long, "mud-bedraggled" dresses are, it is true, condemned in 1844, but width rather than length was the prevailing feature. It was the age of flounces, and this expansive tendency culminated, in the mid-'fifties, in the reign of the crinoline, against which Punch waged for many years a truceless but, as he himself admitted, a wholly ineffectual warfare. The first indication of the coming portent is to be found in the annus mirabilis of 1848, when an "air-tube dress extender" is shown in a picture. This, however, was a single hoop and comparatively modest in its circumference. The crinoline, in its full amplitude, did not invade London until 1856. Thenceforward, hardly a number is free from satire and caricature of this exuberant monstrosity, and the inconvenience caused in theatres, drawing-rooms, in the parks and public vehicles, and in the streets. What with the bath-chairs of invalids, the ladies' dresses, and the children's perambulators, we read in 1856, that "it amounts almost to an impossibility nowadays to walk on the pavements." People were now dressed "not in the height, but the full breadth of the fashion." The structure of the machine, with its whalebone ribs and inflated tubes, was revealed in all its mammoth dimensions. It was denounced alike as an absurdity and as a danger, but satire and warnings were equally powerless to abate the nuisance. But the crinoline was only the most conspicuous and culminating example of a tendency to superfluous clothing and a semi-Oriental muffling-up