Page:Mr Punch's History of Modern England.djvu/8

 capacity indulged in a great deal of vehement partisan rhetoric. The loudest, the most passionate and moving as well as the least judicial of his spokesmen was Douglas Jerrold. The choice of dividing lines between periods must always be somewhat artificial, but I was confirmed in my decision to end the first volume with the year of the Indian Mutiny by the fact that it coincided with the death of Douglas Jerrold, who from 1841 to 1857 had, more than any other writer, been responsible for the Radical and humanitarian views expressed in Punch.

My task would have been greatly simplified by the exclusion of politics altogether. But to do that would have involved the neglect of what is, after all, perhaps the most interesting and in many ways the most honourable phase of Punch's history, his championship of the poor and oppressed, and his efforts to bridge the gap between the "Two Nations"—the phrase which was used and justified in the finest passage of Disraeli's Sybil, and which I have chosen as the title for the first part of the present volume. To write a Social History of England at any time without reference to the political background would be difficult; it is practically impossible in a chronicle based on Punch in the 'forties and 'fifties. In the second part I have endeavoured to redress the balance. Here one recognizes the advantages of Punch's London outlook in dealing with the Court and fashion and the acute contrasts furnished between Mayfair on the one hand and the suburbs and slums on the other.

No attempt has been made to represent Punch as infallible whether as a recorder, a critic, or a prophet. He was often wrong, unjust, and even cruel—notably in his view of Peel and Lincoln, and in his conduct of the "No Popery" crusade—though he seldom failed to make amends, even to the extent of standing in a white sheet over Lincoln's grave. But the majority of these confessions took the form of