Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.
Marriage is like wine. It is not be properly judged until the second glass.
The surest way to hit a woman's heart is to take aim kneeling. — Douglas Jerrold
boy with minimal schooling from a lower middle-class
family raised in a dockyard town in Kent goes up to London, where, after an
apprenticeship as a journalist, he emerges in the 1830s as one of the country's most
popular writers. The early life and rise from obscurity to celebrity of Charles Dickens?
No, this is the story of the first two decades of the life of Douglas William Jerrold (3
January 1803 - 8 June 1857), the source of the above witty aphorisms. One of the
founding partners of Punch, the great magazine of British humour and snide political comment
Whereas Jerrold wrote for the theatre almost as a matter of course
since his father, Samuel, was both an actor and manager of a theater, he became a leading London journalist because he had the right temperament to work as a member of a team and talent to publish in a
burgeoning field during an era of ever-expanding literacy.
Jerrold, who achieved great celebrity as a playwright, major contributor to Punch, and author of book-length comic fiction, barely remembered today. Indeed, as Kathryn Hughes noted in her review of Michael Slater's 2003 biography of Jerrold,
It says something salutary about the way that time erodes celebrity that no one remembers Douglas Jerrold now. Yet in the 1850s his name formed part of a triumvirate of literary stardom that tripped off the tongue. "Dickens-Jerrold-Thackeray" was the phrase you said in one breath when you wanted to refer to the clutch of writers whose prose was powerful enough to change the way that middle-class Britons, from barristers to grocers, thought about the world around them. [The Guardian, 14 December 2002]
Michael Slater aptly subtitled his 2003 biography of Douglas Jerrold "The forgotten hero of literary London," for despite his constant presence before the Victorian public as a radical and reformer, a voice of social conscience, and an entertainer on the pages of London's periodicals and, through his plays, on the stages of its theatres, Jerrold has been largely forgotten. Since Jerrold's name in his heyday was a household word as an editor, playwright, journalist, novelist, and aphoristic wit, as Slater remarks, "the rapid eclipse of Jerrold's fame following his death is remarkable." In his review of Slater's biography, John Sutherland pointed out that
The tenth and central chapter of Michael Slater's biography is entitled 'Jerrold, Dickens, Thackeray'. This, as Slater reminds us (often), is the company his contemporaries expected Douglas Jerrold to keep. Some partisans might even have thought Slater right to put him first. Dickens and Thackeray were pall-bearers at Jerrold's funeral and, according to their contemporary David Masson, 'the three do form a triad so that it is hardly possible to discuss the merits of any one of them without referring to the other two.' Posterity has found it very possible. And, richly informative as Slater's biography is (he has been at it for thirty years), critical resuscitation of Jerrold is unlikely. He is doomed to remain in the obscure sump of Victorian writing, famous for a lifetime only. [30]
Left: Douglas William Jerrold by Sir Daniel Macnee. 1853. Right: Douglas William Jerrold. by E. H. Baily, RA. Both courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Jerrold's Early Life
In 1807, when Douglas Jerrold was just four, his father, the lessee of the little theatre of Wilsby, near Cranbrook in Kent, moved the family moved to Sheerness on the Medway in order to manage the local theatre. There, Douglas attended the local school until age 10, occasionally appearing on stage — he is reputed to have been carried on by no less a theatrical personage than future tragedian Edmund Kean, then playing Rolla in Pizarro, adapted from the German by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1799. When Jerrold was a schoolboy, his father's calling as a professional actor-manager or his mother's as an actor held little attraction for him; later, however, he distinguished himself by writing more than seventy plays — for the most part, melodramas and farces. At the age of ten, showing little promise as a student, the boy who had grown up in a dockyard town joined the Royal Navy in December 1813, becoming the most junior officer-in-training among the crew of the 74-gun H. M. S. Namur, a "guardship" captained by Jane Austen's brother Francis.
After Napoleon's escape from Elba in 1815, Jerrold transferred as midshipman to the H. M. S. Ernest, which was ferrying British troops injured during the Battle of Waterloo. Although Jerrold's love of the sea and ships continued throughout his career as a writer, his conversations with these combat veterans, as well as the nature of their injuries (including grisly amputations), shocked the twelve-year-old, convincing him that he was not cut out for military life. Jerrold, who never saw action during his time in the navy, met another future member of the seventy-strong Dickens Circle, the future marine painter, illustrator, and theatrical set-designer Clarkson Stanfield (1793-1867), who had enlisted as an able seaman under the name Roderick Bland. Although Stanfield was some ten years his senior, and below Jerrold in rank, the pair worked together, organising amateur theatricals aboard ship.
To understand the distinction between the ranks of midshipman and able seaman, one has to appreciate the issue of class in the military. As a midshipman, Jerrold was an officer cadet, a commissioned officer of the lowest rank but still of higher rank than even experienced mariners. After three years of service (that would have been, in Jerrold's case, in 1816) a midshipman could take the examination for the rank of lieutenant. Stanfield, member of a lower social class, served as an able seaman who had been credited with three years' nautical service, and he ranked above sailors with less experience ("ordinary seamen") and "landsmen," those young men with no nautical experience who had been "impressed" or forced into service by a naval press gang.
After Jerrold left the navy, the two young sailors lost sight of each other for seventeen years and did not meet again until Stanfield, who now went by his real name, designed the sets for the production of Jerrold's own The Rent Day, a working-class agrarian melodrama staged at the Drury Lane Theatre, London. James William Thomas Ley (1879-1943), one of the founding members of the Dickens Fellowship in 1902, in The Dickens Circle (1919) implies that in 1832 they renewed what had formerly been close relationship aboard ship:
Some years hence, they shall be sauntering in Richmond Park . . . . There shall be other friends with them. Matters theatrical shall bubble up in the careless ebb and flow of the conversation; and suddenly the Namur middy . . . shall cry — 'Let's have a play, Stanfield, like we had on board the "Namur."' Hence those many merry evenings passed among cordial friends; those hearty laughs over gross stage blunders, those genial suppers after rehearsals, those curious evenings spent upon the stage of Miss Kelly's little theatre, when the little figure of the Namur midshipman might be dimly seen in the centre of the dark pit, all alive; but the presence of which was most authoritatively proved very often, when a clear voice chirped to the laughing actors some pungent witticism or queer turn of thought, provoking 'What, are you there, Jerrold?' as a good-natured reply from the victim. [Ley, pp. 88-89]
However, much had happened to both ex-sailors during the seventeen years between Waterloo and The Rent Day. On 1 January 1816, with his provincial theatrical business in tatters, Jerrold's father, Samuel, was compelled by finances to move his family up to London, Douglas having returned home from sea on 21 October 1815. He was quickly apprenticed to a printer, Mr. Sidney, in Northumberland Street, and in 1819 he became a compositor in the printing-office of the Sunday Monitor. The editor of the paper, who thought young Jerrold's theatrical notice of the initial performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s romantic opera Der Freischütz (The Marksman) showed promise, invited him to write for the paper, and thus at the age of 18 Jerrold became a journalist.
In addition to starting a career in journalism, Jerrold was becoming a playwright; for both professions he made free use of his knowledge of the theatre and his experiences as a junior naval officer. On 30 April 1821, Sadler's Wells produced his comedy More Frightened than Hurt, which as The Duellists Arnold, manager of The English Opera House, had rejected three years earlier. In the fall of 1824, the "little Shakespeare in a camlet cloak," as he was called by his theatrical associates, married Mary Swan. Making a namne for himself as a prolific writer of farces, Jerrold was employed in 1825 for a few pounds a week to write various types of dramas for George Bolwell Davidge (1793-1842), the manager as well as the leading actor at The Royal Coburg (later, The Old Vic), then just a minor playhouse in Lambeth. In 1829, after a rancorous quarrel with the exacting Davidge, Jerrold left the Coburg, and went to work for Robert William Elliston (1774-1831), the manager and lessee of The Surrey, the other prominent playhouse on the south bank of the Thames. Here, Jerrold and Elliston almost immediately scored a theatrical triumph with Jerrold's melodrama Black-Ey'd Susan; or, All in the Downs, with leading man and character actor Thomas Potter Cooke in the role of William, the piece's nautical hero — it ran for over 300 nights, an extraordinary record for the time. Based in part upon Jerrold's own experience in the Royal Navy, the melodrama exhibited his strong emotional connection with the working class and his anti-authoritarian stance. It made him a household name throughout the 1830s and remained among his most popular plays.
Jerrold the Fledgling Journalist
During his journalistic apprenticeship in the 1820s he acquired another, less flattering nickname — "Savage Little Robespierre" — on account of his radical reform stance born out of his personal detestation of the type of tyrannical rule which he had witnessed first-hand in the floggings used to enforce shipboard discipline. During the 1820s, he began to favour the then-popular genre of the melodrama, which had strong working-class appeal and accorded well with his Liberal and radical notions of social and political reform, over romantic comedy and farce. By 1835, he was both a recognised dramatist and a well-established journalist, contributing regularly to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and other periodicals. Thus, in 1841 he was sufficiently well-known as a professional writer to join the cadre of talented writers who were founding Punch, contributing satirical political squibs under the pseudonym "Q." In the eyes of the public eye until the advent of Punch, Jerrold had been first and foremost a playwright — and the revenues from his plays kept the magazine afloat until it began to make a profit. As his great-great-great granddaughter explains, Jerrold's generosity once necessitated his suddenly having to decamp for Paris:
In December 1836 Douglas had to flee to Paris with his wife and baby daughter, leaving the other children in the care of Mrs Reid. His generous nature in backing a bill for an acquaintance which was not honoured left him financially embarrassed. During his stay in Paris he was kept entertained by William Makepiece Thackeray and also Henry Mayhew, who would later marry his daughter. [Yvonne Jerrold]
Jerrold and the Dickens Circle
Upon his return from the French capital Jerrold finally met Dickens, then editor of Bentley's Miscellany and a rising star in London's literary firmament. However, despite this congenial meeting the two writers did not work together for another nine years. Although the young editor of Bentley's Miscellany failed to recruit Jerrold as a feature writer for the new magazine, the pair shared similarly "Radical" and reformist views. Their friendship of two decades dissolved over their opposing views on public executions. They renewed the friendship by 1855 after Jerrold pleaded for an end to the rift. Jerrold's relationship with William Makepeace Thackeray was more complex on account of the differences in their temperaments, social backgrounds, artistic beliefs, and outlooks on life. Another of Jerrold's significant literary friendships was that with the young Dickens acolyte with progressive opinions, Wilkie Collins.
Despite perpetual ill-health, Jerrold was so successful as a professional writer that he became a member of the Dickens circle, rubbing shoulders with such Victorian luminaries as illustrator and cartoonist John Leech, politician, novelist, and dramatist Sir Edward G. D. Bulwer Lytton, and fellow journalist and critic John Forster, ultimately Dickens's biographer. Jerrold's formula for melodrama likely influenced Dickens's construction of The Christmas Books (1843-48). The single work that most obviously exhibits Jerrold's influence and reflects his social and political views is The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (16 December 1844). Consequently, he was one of the select few invited to Dickens's reading of the novella from the proofs at 58, Lincoln's Inn Fields during Dickens's flying visit to London from Genoa on 1 December 1844 — the others present were Forster, Laman Blanchard, Thomas Carlyle, W. J. Fox, Fred Dickens, Daniel Maclise, William Harness, and Clarkson Stanfield.
Left: Douglas William Jerrold by Sir Daniel Macnee. 1853. Right: Douglas William Jerrold. by George Herbert Watkins. Both courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Jerrold and The Punch Men
The founding of Punch on 17 July 1841 is the first significant event in the history of Victorian periodicals, the second being newsagent Herbert Ingram's founding of The Illustrated London News on Saturday 14 May 1842. Although Douglas Jerrold was neither first nor second editor of Punch (those honours belong to the journalists Mark Lemon and Henry Mayhew), he was one of the founding partners and first contributors. The other principals were the printer and engraver Ebenezer Landells and the illustrator Archibald Henning, who designed the first cover. Lemon and Mayhew had conceived of the idea of a humorous weekly paper to be called Punch, and initially served as joint-editors; with the printer Landells they were equal partners in the enterprise. The magazine's name prompted an early popular joke about one of the magazine's first editors, Lemon, that "Punch is nothing without lemon." The subtitle The London Charivari paid homage to Charles Philipon's French magazine of satirical humour, Le Charivari. Whereas the ILN's circulation soon increased to 40,000 and by the end of its first year of operation was 60,000, Punch struggled financially with tepid sales until it was taken over by Bradbury and Evans and edited solely by Lemon, who meantime had been serving as Ingram's chief adviser for the ILN.
According to Slater,
Jerrold's fame and influence had increased considerably as a result of his writings for Punch from 1841; in the pages of this widely circulated comic weekly he waged satiric class-warfare against well-fed, moralizing magistrates dealing out harsh justice to the desperately poor, pontificating high-earning prelates, game-reserving landowners, and all who exploited or were indifferent to the plight of the poor. Dickens applauded his work, so full of 'gallant truths' (16 November 1844), and praised his 'Story of a Feather' (about a lovely young orphan struggling to earn an honest living in the slums) as 'a wise and beautiful book'. He fully shared Jerrold's unease in 1846 when Punch appeared to e becoming less earnest in its concern with social matters and going in for an 'eternal gaffaw' about everything (Pilgrim 4.643 n.). Jerrold was professionally associated with Dickens only once, when he wrote leaders for the Daily News during Dickens's brief editorship (1846), but, like other members of the Punch circle, he acted in Dickens's amateur theatricals, his Master Stephen in Every Man In His Humour being much admired (by Queen Victoria among others). [Slater, "Jerrold, Douglas William," p. 303]
Jerrold the Dramatist
The actor and ex-Royal Navy sailor T. P. Cooke (1786-1864) as William in the Surrey production of Jerrold's “Black-Ey'd Susan.” Click on image to enlarge it.
Jerrold's Black-Ey'd Susan inspired a long line of marine melodramas, including the famous W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan operetta H. M. S. Pinafore. However, not nearly so well known today are Jerrold's other highly popular plays of the 1830s and 1840s, beginning in the 1820s with More Frightened than Hurt (1821), Fifteen Years of a Drunkard's Life (1828), and Law and Lions (1829), and including The Mutiny at the Nile (1830), The Housekeeper (1830), Martha Willis, the Servant-Girl (1831), The Wedding Gown (1834), The Painter of Ghent (1836), Bubbles of the Day (1842), Time Works Wonders (1845), and his final play, The Heart of Gold (1854). The Bride of Ludgate (8 December 1832) was the first of a number of his plays that were produced at Drury Lane. However, none of these matched the theatrical success of Black-Ey'd Susan (1829) with its genial comedy, touching sentiment, and common touch so appreciated by working-class audiences at such minor theatres as The Coburg and The Surrey. Jerrold's Gnatbrain in Black-Ey'd Susan offers his own version of the Jerrold formula for popular melodrama: "one broken head — then, one stony-hearted landlord — one innocent young woman — ditto, jealous [the comic woman who contrasts the heroine] — one man tolerably honest — and one somewhat damaged [the comic man]" (I, iii). The result is a play that often does not cohere, the comic business of the subplot being poorly integrated into the serious business of the main plot.
Jerrold produced over seventy plays among his one-hundred-and-sixty-one published works. His second most popular and famous melodrama (after Black-Ey'd Susan) was equally proletarian in its sympathies: The Rent Day (1832), based on a well-known painting by Sir David Wilkie, R. A. Jerrold's "formula" for melodrama may be deduced from an analysis of these particular melodramas. It involved, first of all, strongly distinguished characters: the stout-hearted tar or sturdy young farmer, the vicious squire, the greedy steward, the virtuous peasant girl, and a noble but exploited peasantry. Added to these stereotypical characters was occasional music to heighten the suspense and accompany the entrances and exits of certain principals. Domestic matters intruded into both the serious main plot and the comic subplots. The setting is a country village in which poverty oppresses the honest, diligent agrarian workers who are being exploited by a negligent landlord and his ruthless agent.
Jerrold as a Writer of Prose
Frontispiece and Title-page of Jerrold’s Story of a Feather (1844). Click on image to enlarge it.
As John Sutherland remarks in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, given Jerrold's brief formal education, "That he should in manhood have been intellectual and scholarly is one of the heroic feats of Victorian self-improvement" (332). Although his most popular fictional works — Story of a Feather (1844, with frontispiece and title-page vignette by Leech), Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures (1844), The Life and Adventures of Miss Robinson Crusoe (1846) — do not reveal much scholarship, his lesser known historical works reveal his ability to research and make relevant historical figures and periods. He reached the pinnacle of his journalistic career in 1846, founding his own weekly newspaper and Douglas Jerrold's Shilling Magazine — unfortunately, neither proved financially successful. However, he landed on his journalistic sealegs as the editor of Lloyd's Weekly Magazine, earning a thousand pounds a year from 1852 until his death at age fifty-four. Under his editorship it vaulted from almost nonentity to a circulation of 182,000. He so effectively established the publication's popular appeal that it endured well into the twentieth century.
Despite the overwhelming box-office successes of his melodramas, Jerrold's best loved works were his situation comedies in prose; although he employed some of traditional techniques of fiction, these do not exhibit much development of character or narrative progression. He relies on the "running gag" and the "tag-line" of contemporary theatre — Mrs. Caudle's nagging, for example, continually deprives her husband of sleep. Although he wrote a number of works of volume length, these are mostly tales and sketches. His only true novel, The History Of St. Giles And St. James, which John Leech illustrated, he intended as the principal serial for his own new monthly magazine in 1845. It is perfectly attuned to the spirit of political reform and social criticism of the mid-1840s, and as savage as Dickens's Chimes in its criticism of arbitrary authority. In the words of his 1851 preface, Jerrold designed it to show the "ignorant disregard of the social claims of the poor upon the rich, of the governed millions on the governing few" (Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, p. 333).
On 13 July 1850 he wrote in the persona of "Mrs. Amelia Mouser" about the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, coining the metaphor "the palace of very crystal." From then on, the chief venue for the fair was popularly called "The Crystal Palace," constructed by his friend Joseph Paxton. Whereas Jerrold never contributed to Dickens's highly successful weekly journal in the 1850s, his son and biographer, William Blanchard Jerrold (1826-84), was a frequent contributor to Household Words. Although in 1848 Jerrold took no part in the Dickens-organised performances for the endowment of Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon, for the Guild of Literature and Art Jerrold took the comic role of Mr. Shadowy Softhead in Bulwer-Lytton's Not so Bad as we Seem at Devonshire House in 1851, and subsequently took a number of prominent roles in the Guild's provincial tour. At this point, Dickens and Jerrold broke over the issue of capital punishment, but Jerrold made the first approach to repair the friendship at a London club, saying, "For God's sake, let us be friends again. A Life's not long enough for this." By the spring of 1857, however, even though they had re-established their friendship, the old warmth of feeling not entirely renewed. Jerrold's health had deteriorated visibly. Dickens recalled that he had been unwell for three or four days, putting it down to the smell of new paint from his study window. Jerrold was nauseous, weak and giddy, and unable to hold down any food. Dickens thought he looked extremely ill, but that, later in the evening of his visit, he seemed to have recovered somewhat. The next day he was seized with fits of vomiting and violent stomach pains, and there followed a week of much suffering with periods of remission.
After Jerrold's Death
After Jerrold's death, likely from stomach cancer, on Monday, 15 June 1857 at 12.30 P. M. at the age of 54, a funeral featuring a number of literary and artistic luminaries took place at Norwood Cemetery. The pall bearers were his very dear friends — Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), John Forster, Joseph Paxton, Mark Lemon, Charles Knight, Horace Mayhew, Hepworth Dixon, and fellow Punch writer Shirley Brooks. Dickens had learned of his friend's death from a train passenger who was reading the morning paper. Blanchard Jerrold, Jerrold's oldest son and biographer, was embarrassed when Dickens determined to organize a benefit performance of The Frozen Deep to offer financial support to his mother. The benefit performances of Jerrold's The Rent Day and Black-Ey'd Susan ran several nights with a lecture by Thackeray, day and night readings by Dickens, and then a lecture by Lord John Russell and a subscription performance of The Frozen Deep at Tavistock House — entirely stage-managed by Dickens. These performances were repeated provincially, and again with great financial success — raising close to two thousand pounds in total.
The obituary in the Times on 17 June 1857 asserted that "His place in English literature is vacant and we seek in vain for one worthy to stand in the breach." In reflection Dickens wrote to his oldest son, Charles Culliford Dickens (1837-1896),
"Few of his friends, I think, can have had more favourable opportunities of knowing him in his gentlest and most affectionate aspect, than I had. He was one of the gentlest and most affectionate of men. I remember very well that when I first saw him about the year 1835, when I went into his sick room in Brittle Grove, Brompton, I found him propped up in a great chair, bright-eyed and quick and eager in spirit, but very lame in body, he gave me an impression of tenderness. It never became dissociated from him. There was nothing cynical or sour in his heart as I knew it. In the company of children and young people he was particularly happy, and showed to extraordinary advantage. He never was so gay, so sweet tempered, so pleasing and so pleased as then. Among my own children I observed this many and many a time. [quoted by Ley, pp. 90-91]
Author, journalist, and fellow ex-Royal Navy sailor James Hannay, who had personally known Jerrold for only the last six years of the old radical's life, justly assessed the worth of his literary production for the inaugural number of The Atlantic Monthly on 2 November 1857, in the lead article — an odd placement and priority for an obituary, especially such a long obituary:
His first fame and success, however, were owing to the Drama; and though his non-dramatic labors were greater and still more successful, he never altogether left the stage. I repeat, that I value his plays, most, because they helped to discipline him for his after-work; and I thank the theatre chiefly for ripening in its heat the philosophic humorist. That was the real character of the man. He tried many things, and he produced much; but the root of him was that he was a humorous thinker. He did not write first-rate plays, or first-rate novels, rich as he was in the elements of playwright and novelist. He was not an artist. But he had a rare and original eye and soul, and in a peculiar way he could pour out himself. In short, to be an Essayist was the bent of his nature and genius. [The Atlantic Monthly, p. 4]
Jerrold in maturity had a striking profile, with shaggy grey hair tumbling about his forehead, as one sees in an engraving from a bust of him by Edward Hodges Baily, R. A., an image of which is the frontispiece for his biography by Blanchard Jerrold. Sir Daniel Macnee's painting of Jerrold in the National Portrait Gallery, dated 1853, shows a rather more distinguished literary figure with gold-and-green waistcoat, an aesthetic, less rugged visage, a searching gaze, pale hands and face — and a cityscape with St. Paul's Cathedral in the background. This fifty-year-old with an intellectual expression does not entirely match contemporary descriptions of Jerrold as vivacious, boyish, and clumsy. Nor does the 1853 portrait capture his indignation at political veniality and social injustice, or his radicalism and fiery impulsiveness. However, there is a certain diffidence about the sitter that is consistent with his reluctance to undertake public speaking, despite his sophistication and ready wit. In studying this portrait, one can well conceive of this middle-aged man as the founder of and participant in various London literary clubs, including "The Mulberries" in 1824, "The Museum" in 1847, "The Whittington," "Our Club" (see Willert Beale, Light of Other Days, volume one, chapter 6, and T. Sydney Cooper, My Life, volume two, chapter 32). His only literary legacy is his son's investigation of the less sophisticated and more down-to-earth aspects of the English metropolis, London: A Pilgrimage, with illustrations by Gustave Doré (1872). By the end of the nineteenth century, his plays were rarely staged and his novels little read. His collected Works were published in eight volumes in the years before his death, but were never re-issued.
Bibliography
Anon. [Hannay, James.]"Douglas Jerrold" [obituary]. The Atlantic Monthly. Vol. 1, No. 1 (2 November 1857): 1-12.
"Bibliography for Douglas Jerrold." The Online Books Page: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Jerrold%2c%20Douglas%2c%201803-1857.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z. The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In. Illustrated by John Leech, Clarkson Stanfield, and Richard Doyle. London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.
Hughes, Kathryn. "The Nearly Man: Review of Douglas Jerrold: A Life (1803-1857) by Michael Slater. 351pp, Duckworth, £25." The Guardian. 14 December 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/dec/14/featuresreviews.guardianreview7
Jerrold, Douglas. Black-Ey'd Susan; or, All in the Downs. (1829). Nineteenth Century Plays, ed. George Rowell. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1972. Pp. 1-44.
Jerrold, Douglas. The Rent Day. (1832). British Plays of the Nineteenth Century, ed. J. O. Bailey. New York: Odyssey, 1966. Pp. 258-80.
Jerrold, Yvonne. "Barbie Handley's Life of Douglas William Jerrold." http://www.yvonnejerrold.com/FamilyTree/L-DouglasWilliamJerrold-biog.html.
Leech, John (illustrator). "The frontispiece & title-page vignette" for Douglas Jerrold's The Story of a Feather. London: Bradbury and Evans at the offices of Punch, 1844. https://www.artisanbooksandbindery.com/pages/books/25067/douglas-jerrold/the-story-of-a-feather
"T. P. Cooke as William." Artist unknown. The Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich, n. d. [1829] http://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/14105.html#PxtqQyPzOC6FGiyf.99
Ley, James William Thomas. Chapter 13, "Douglas Jerrold." The Dickens Circle: A Narrative of the Novelist's Friendships. New York: Dutton, 1919. Pp. 83-91.
Rowell, George. The Victorian Theatre 1792-1913, A Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956. Rpt. 1967.
Slater, Michael. Douglas Jerrold 1803-1857: The forgotten hero of literary London. London: Duckworth, 2003.
Slater, Michael. "Jerrold, Douglas William." The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens, ed. Paul Schlicke, Paul. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999. P. 303.
Sutherland, John. "He Ate Peas with a Knife — Review of Douglas Jerrold: 1803-57 by Michael Slater." London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 7 (3 April 2003), pp. 30-31.
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal: Stanford U. P., 1989.
Last modified 3 August 2017