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Mrs. Caudle's Morning Decoration —; Initial Letter "C"
Charles Keene
1866
Wood-engraving
6.3 cm high by 5.2 cm wide, framed
Forty-seventh illustration for Douglas Jerrold's Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures (first published in August 1845): "The Twenty-Ninth Lecture," p.147.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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"Oh, Caudle, you ought to have had something nice to-night; for you're not well, love —; I know you're not. Ha! that's like you men —; so headstrong! You will have it that nothing ails you; but I can tell, Caudle. The eye of a wife —; and such a wife as I've been to you —; can at once see whether a husband's well or not. You've been turning like tallow all the week; and what’s more, you eat nothing now. It makes me melancholy to see you at a joint. I don't say anything at dinner before the children; but I don't feel the less. No, no; you're not very well; and you're not as strong as a horse. Don't deceive yourself —; nothing of the sort. No, and you don't eat as much as ever: and if you do, you don’t eat with a relish, I'm sure of that. You can't deceive me there.
"But I know what’s killing you. It's the confinement; it's the bad air you breathe; it's the smoke of London. Oh yes, I know your old excuse: you never found the air bad before. Perhaps not. But as people grow older, and get on in trade —; and, after all, we’ve nothing to complain of, Caudle —; London air always disagrees with 'em. Delicate health comes with money: I'm sure of it. What a colour you had once, when you'd hardly a sixpence; and now, look at you!
"’Twould add thirty years to your life —; and think what a blessing that would be to me; not that I shall live a tenth part of the time —; thirty years, if you'd take a nice little house somewhere at Brixton. ["Twenty-Ninth Lecture, Mrs. Caudle thinks 'The time has come to have a cottage out of town'," pp. 147-148]
Her distress, whether genuine or assumed, about the deplorable strate of the London house in the previous lecture (situated temporally upon the same day that they have returned from France via Margate) sets up the proposition that the Caudles consider purchasing a cottage in one of the newly-developed suburbs in "Lecture XXIX, Mrs. Caudle thinks 'The time has come to have a cottage out of town'." Confinement in the polluted city air, argues Margaret Caudle, is "killing" Job, who is looking pale. She proposes Brixton, Baalam Hill, and Clapham Common, all of which (incidentally) will inhibit Job's visiting his club and the Masonic lodge. He dismisses Clapham as bad for retaining business connections, Battersea as "too low," Hampstead as too cold, and Fulham as too churchy. In short, objects Job, a suburban cottage "will be so far from business" (151). No matter: within two weeks they have moved to "a green bird-cage of a house" which Margaret calls "The Turtle-Dovery" (151). However, in the next lecture she complains of the locale's remoteness: she feels "buried alive" (152).
Jerrold, Douglas. Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures, as Suffered by the late Job Caudle.Edited from the Original MSS. by Douglas Jerrold. With a frontispiece by Leech, and as motto on the title-page, "Then, Pistol, lay thy head in Fury's lap. —; Shakespeare." London: Punch Office; Bradbury and Evans, 1846.
Jerrold, Douglas. Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures. Illustrated by John Leach and Richard Doyle. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1856.
Jerrold, Douglas. Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures. Illustrated by Charles Keene. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1866.
Last modified 21 December 2017