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Mr. Caudle's return from "The Skylarks"
John Leech
1846
Wood-engraving
duodecimo page
Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures, published at the offices of Punch.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Curtain lecture may be simply defined as a censorious lecture by a wife to her husband, often while in bed. It has almost, but not quite totally, vanished from the language; anyone coming across it now might wrongly associate it with a talk preceding a performance in a theatre. The direct mental link between beds and curtains has disappeared because the four-poster, with its canopy and hangings creating an intimate draught-free enclosure, is no longer a standard item of domestic furniture.
The most famous giver of a curtain lecture was fictitious, by the name of Mrs. Margaret Caudle. She was "interminably loquacious and militantly gloomy under fancied marital oppression," as a writer later described her. — "Curtain Lecture," World-Wide Words: Investigating the English language across the globe.
The staggering number of illustrations in the 1866 volume, thirty-three taken directly from Punch and fifty-seven by Keene, include five 1845 illustrations by Leech and twenty-eight by fellow Punch staffer Richard Doyle. Since thirty-three of the ninety plates in the 1866 are in fact merely ornamental initial-letter vignettes, the book contains fifty-seven actual illustrations, largely by Charles Keene. Leech's original frontispiece showing simultaneously Mr. Caudle's attempting to sneak upstairs and his wife's waiting for him does not appear in the 1866 edition.
"Curtain Lecture." World-Wide Words: Investigating the English language across the globe. http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-cur1.htm
Jerrold, Douglas William. Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures. London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1866.
Jerrold, Douglas William. Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1856.
Kelly, Richard. "Mrs. Caudle: A Victorian Curtain Lecturer." University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 38, Number 3 (April 1969): 295-309 Project Muse http://muse.jhu.edu/article/559417/pdf.
Spielmann, Marion Harry. History of 'Punch'. London and New York: Cassell, 1895.
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal: Stanford U. P., 1989.
Created 4 September 2017
Last modified 17 May 2024
