Mr. Lambkin cuts a pretty figure . . . before the Magistrate
George Cruikshank
1844
Steel-engraving
9.8 cm high by 8.9 cm wide, framed
Fourteenth illustration for George Cruikshank's The Bachelor’s Own Book; Or, The Progress Of Mr. Lambkin (Gent.), in the Pursuit Of Pleasure And Amusement (page 27).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Mr. Lambkin and his friends cut a pretty figure in the morning before the Magistrate — their conduct is described as violent and outrageous and their respectability is questioned — Mr. Lambkin and his friends insist on being Gentlemen, and are, of course, discharged upon payment of 5/ each for being drunk — and making good the damage at the prices usually charged to Gentlemen. [page 27]
J. Ewing Ritchie gives the following figures for 1856:
it appears that in all 73,240 persons were taken into custody, of whom 45,941 were males, and 27,209 females; 18,000 of the apprehensions were on account of drunkenness, 8160 for unlawful possession of goods, 7021 for simple larceny, 6763 for common assaults, 2194 for assaults on the police; 4303 women were taken into custody as prostitutes. (qtd. in Jackson 63)
In the Cruikshank illustration, Lambkin and his cronies are guilty of both public drunkenness as well as for forcibly resisting arrest — "drunk and disorderly in a public place." The rowdiness is all the more egregious because the gentlemen have resisted the efforts of the Bobbies to restore the peace in the midst of densely inhabited, middle-class district. Now an unkempt Lambkin in shredded trousers and his fellow-revellers, also much the worse for wear, appear in police magistrate's court. At the moment realised, one of the arresting officers is giving his testimony about the "nocturnal amusements" and a magistrate (right) is assiduously recording the account. Cruikshank identifies the reveller at the extreme left by his checkered trousers as the same miscreant to whom the policeman was taking his nightstick in the complementary plate on the facing page, Mr. Lambkin and his friends, after supper at "the rooms," indulge in the usual nocturnal amusements. His white coat is shabby from his being knocked down, and he wears a bandage about his head. The gentlemanly trio, in fact, look every bit as scruffy as the various working-class malefactors, in particular, the man at the prisoner's dock, standing beside his wife. Cruikshank had provided a more rough-and-ready interpretation of the police magistrate's court in the satirical Automaton Police Officer and the Real Offenders in Dickens's Mudfog Papers in Bentley's Miscellany, September 1838.
The question of reader-viewer sympathy disrupts the comedy of pain that Cruikshank invokes in the companion illustrations delineating Lambkin's brush with the law. Since Cruikshank does not depict the "nocturnal amusements" of the protagonist and his drunken associates, the viewer is likely to find the response of the minions of the law excessive. If Lambkin has merely engaged in petty vandalism, where is the justice in his being set upon by the constabulary — and where is the humour, especially if the viewer has begun to identify himself with Lambkin and regard him as a relatively innocent victim of circumstances? Or has he, indeed, brought this beating upon himself by his own misdemeanours? If the punishment is unmerited or excessive, it certainly does not, in the words of W. S. Gilbert in The Mikado (1885) "fit the crime." In other words, the police beating violates the principles of "retributive justice."
My object all sublime I shall achieve in time — To let the punishment fit the crime — The punishment fit the crime; And make each prisoner pent Unwillingly represent A source of innocent merriment! Of innocent merriment! ["A more humane Mikado," Act 2: p. 623]
Poetic Justice, or a proportionate response of the universe to the malefactor, is a cornerstone of British fiction; Lambkin's being beaten with a truncheon hardly constitutes "a source of innocent merriment" in that the beating seems to violate the decorum of Nemesis. However, the civilised conduct of the magistrate's court reverses the disproportionate response by imposing appropriate and substantive fines on the bourgeois rowdies, perhaps even having a deterrent value — unlike the sentence which that same court imposes upon Dickens's Artful Dodger: for the theft of a snuff-box, the magistrate sentences the prolix street-urchin to Australian Transportation. There, it is not the sentence but the Dodger's response to it that creates the comedy; here, we find it difficult to accept the conduct of the Bobbies as appropriate and warranted, so that we are, between the two illustrations in the seventh plate, ambivalent about whether Lambkin's brush with the law is funny or pathetic. At least, Lambkin, though a flawed protagonist, is hardly a "rosy dull society sinner" (Gilbert, 623), but rather somebody whom we can both laugh at, deplore, and occasionally (as here) sympathize with.
Left: Cruikshank's animated and engaging portrait of gentlemen rowdies in Sketches by Boz (1836-39), Our Next-door Neighbour. Right: Cruikshank's view of an inebriated London gentleman's disrupting a theatrical performance, Making a Night of It in Sketches by Boz (1836-39). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Cruikshank's amusing cartoon illustrating Dickens's satire on the possibility of utilising what we call Artificial Intelligence in policing, Automaton Police Officer and the Real Offenders (1838). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Above: James Mahoney's realistic wood-engraving of the Artful Dodger's being arraigned for petty theft: "What is this?" inquired one of the magistrates. — "A pick-pocketing case, Your Worship." [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Cruikshank, George. The Bachelor’s Own Book; Or, The Progress Of Mr. Lambkin, In The Pursuit Of Pleasure And Amusement. Glasgow: David Bryce, 1844, rpt. 1880.
Gilbert, William Schwenk. "A more humane Mikado." The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu. The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, ed. Ian Bradley. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1996. Pp. 621-25.
Jackson, Lee. A Dictionary of Victorian London. London: Anthem, 2006. (See review.)
Last modified 24 May 2018
