[Victorian Web Home —> Douglas Jerrold —> Illustration —> Charles Keene —> Next]

Passage Illustrated: Caudle Imagined Coming Home from the Tavern

"Yes, I see how it will be. Now you've once gone to a tavern, you'll always be going. You’ll be coming home tipsy every night; and tumbling down and breaking your leg, and putting out your shoulder; and bringing all sorts of disgrace and expense upon us. And then you’ll be getting into a street fight —; oh! I know your temper too well to doubt it, Mr. Caudle —; and be knocking down some of the police. And then I know what will follow. It must follow. Yes, you'll be sent for a month or six weeks to the treadmill. Pretty thing that, for a respectable tradesman, Mr. Caudle, to be put upon the treadmill with all sorts of thieves and vagabonds, and —; there, again, that horrible tobacco! —; and riffraff of every kind. I should like to know how your children are to hold up their heads, after their father has been upon the treadmill? — No; I won't go to sleep. And I'm not talking of what's impossible. I know it will all happen —; every bit of it. If it wasn't for the dear children, you might be ruined and I wouldn't so much as speak about it, but —; oh, dear, dear! at least you might go where they smoke good tobacco —; but I can’t forget that I'm their mother. At least, they shall have one parent.

"Taverns! Never did a man go to a tavern who didn't die a beggar. And how your pot-companions will laugh at you when they see your name in the Gazette! For it must happen. Your business is sure to fall off; for what respectable people will buy toys for their children of a drunkard? You're not a drunkard! No: but you will be — it's all the same.

"You've begun by staying out till midnight. By-and-by 'twill be all night. But don’t you think, Mr. Caudle, you shall ever have a key. I know you. Yes; you'd do exactly like that Prettyman, and what did he do, only last Wednesday? Why, he let himself in about four in the morning, and brought home with him his pot-companion, Puffy. His dear wife woke at six, and saw Prettyman's dirty boots at her bedside. And where was the wretch, her husband? Why, he was drinking downstairs —; swilling. Yes; worse than a midnight robber, he'd taken the keys out of his dear wife's pockets —; ha! what that poor creature has to bear! —; and had got at the brandy. A pretty thing for a wife to wake at six in the morning, and instead of her husband to see his dirty boots! ["The Second Lecture. —; Mr. Caudle has been at a tavern with a friend, and "is enough to poison a woman" with tobacco-smoke," p. 5]

Commentary

Keene's choice of subject is somewhat misleading. In the image of the staggering, middle-aged bourgeois Londoners the illustrator implies that Mr. Caudle has already spent the evening imbibing ale at the local watering-hole, and is now thoroughly inebriated as he totters home with a "pot-companion." The fellow to the right may even be Mrs. Caudle's negative exemplum, the dubiously-named neighbour Mr. Harry Prettyman, who regularly stays out until 2:00 A. M. and returns reeking of alcohol and tobacco. In fact, Mr. Caudle, seeking the solace of male-companionship, has just announced that he intends to visit the local public house that evening, and that he will not be singing, swearing at the door-mat, or staying out until two in the morning. Despite her dire warnings about the deleterious effects of consuming alcohol in such places, in the monologue Jerrold has incorporated Caudle's protestations that he is not a drunkard, will not be featured in the gazette among the bankrupts, and will not bring home such disreputable companions as Puffy, Prettyman's drinking-companion. Thus, Jerrold's ironically summing up his wife's dire predictions with

To this lecture, Caudle affixes no comment. A certain proof, we think, that the man had nothing to say for himself. [p. 11]

is spurious, for Mrs. Caudle's words have actually synthesized her husband's rebuttals. Her portrait of an alcoholic who loses business and family, however, is perfectly consistent with the visual warnings of Temperance Uniuon advocate George Cruikshank in his two pro-abstience series The Bottle (1847) and The Drunkard's Children (1848). Her cautionary commentary reflects such Cruikshankian prognostications as He Is Discharged from His Employment for Drunkenness: They Pawn Their Clothes to Supply the Bottle. In his review of the portfolio in his own Weekly Paper (11 September 1847) Jerrold himself had metaphorically described gin as "the juniper poison" (cited in Meisel, p. 124) since it had such deplorable effects on Victorian family life. The second lecture, then, reflects the anxieties of middle-class wives about the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption in the 1840s, and which undoubtedly continued unabated into the 1860s. Nevertheless, Keene's illustration concerns an imagined rather than actual event.

Bibliography

Cruikshank, George. The Bottle. London: David Bogue, 1847.

Cruikshank, George. The Drunkard's Children. A Sequel to "The Bottle." London: David Bogue, 1848.

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.

Meisel, Martin. Chapter 7, "From Hogarth to Cruikshank." Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1989. Pp. 97-141.

​

---

Victorian
Web

Visual
Arts

Illus-
tration

Charles
Keene

Next

Last modified 9 November 2017