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Every way I've been insulted. I should like to know who it was who corked whiskers on my dear aunt's picture? Oh! you're laughing, are you? You're not laughing? Don't tell me that. I should like to know what shakes the bed, then, if you're not laughing? Yes, corked whiskers on her dear face, —; and she was a dear soul to you, Caudle, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself to see her ill−used. Oh, you may laugh! It's very easy to laugh! I only wish you'd a little feeling, like other people, that's all. ["The Thirteenth Lecture. —; Mrs. Caudle has been to see her dear mother. Caudle, on the 'Joyful Occasion,' has given a party, and issued the subjoined card of invitation," pp. 61-62]

Commentary: The Aftermath of Mr. Caudle's Little Dinner Party

Although the initial letter vignette leads off the thirteenth lecture, in it Keene alludes to Mrs. Caudle's last (and, one suspects, chief) complaint: somebody has put whiskers on the portrait of her mother that hangs in the temple of domesticity, the front parlour. This act of vandalism, petty though it may be (and probably easily repaired), is more galling to Margaret Caudle than the broken china and holes burnt in the carpet. Thus, since it is uppermost in her mind at bedtime, Keene places it first, although it appears on the last full page of text. Keene has imagined the dialogue as not occurring in the master-bedroom, but in the parlour, although Caudle's being in his dressing-gown suggests that the time is late on the day of Mrs. Caudle's return home.

Instrumental to the effect of the thirteenth "lecture" is Richard Doyle's 19 April 1845 Punch illustration of Job Caudle's invitation-card to that domestic rogue and rebel, Richard Prettyman, the companion of some of Caudle's slight misadventures, such as that to Greenwich Fair. The card on the second page reinforces the nature of the problem that the visit of the few males friends has caused. Doyle's featuring a bottle (of gin, one presumes), a glass, a punch-bowl and a long-stemmed tobacco-pipe as the governing motifs of When the cat's away the mice will play prepares the reader for Mrs. Caudle's chastizing her husband at bedtime for the deplorable state in which he and his friends have left the dining-room and the parlour.

As the analogue of the domestic straw broom tied to the pipe in the invitation-card, Margaret Caudle will have to set all to rights —; although her husband will have to foot the bill for new carpeting and drapery. In the Keene illustration, drinking and smoking are indeed in progress, but the gathering does not seem to be nearly as raucous as Margaret Caudle imagines it to have been. Caudle (centre) is enjoying a large glass of punch, but he and his guests look none the worse for drink and tobacco-consumption, and Keene includes neither steam from the punch-bowl, nor the fifty lemons used in the preparation of the beverage, nor yet the smoke from the pipes of these middle-aged, middle-class gentlemen enjoying each other's company without the restrictive presence of women and children. Mrs, Caudle's biases are all to evident when she describes the party as the convergeance of a "pack" of would-be bachelors: "You can sit up half the night with a pack of people who don't care for you" (63). Her opinion of the crowd cannot have been improved by the school-boy prank somebody has played upon her mother's portrait, vandalism which she has received as a direct insult. Certainly Keene's image of Caudle's respectable-looking guests in Keene's Mr. Caudle has invited a few Friends to Supper is at variance with the "corking" of the mother-in-law's portrait in the introductory vignette.

Bibliography

"A Brief History of Chubb 1818 - 1990s." The Chubb Archive.​ http://www.chubbarchive.co.uk/page5.html

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.

Rossen, Jake."History: The Man Who Picked Victorian London's Unpickable Lock." Mental Floss. 3 August 2017. http://mentalfloss.com/article/501820/man-who-picked-victorian-londons-unpickable-lock

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Last modified 17 November 2017