Charles Keene's "Home! Sweet Home! —; Mrs. Caudle's Return," forDouglas Jerrold's"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures" (1866)

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Home! Sweet Home! —; Mrs. Caudle's Return, Initial Letter "A"

Charles Keene

1866

Wood-engraving

6.3 cm high by 5.1 cm wide, framed

Forty-sixth illustration for Douglas Jerrold's Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures (first published in August 1845): "The Twenty-Eighth Lecture," p.143.

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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Illustrated: The Caudles return home to London

"That's like your sneering; I know what you mean. Of course; I never can think of making myself comfortable, but you wound my feelings. If you cared for your own bed like any other man, you’d not have stayed out till this hour. Don't say that I drove you out of the house as soon as we came in it. I only just spoke about the dirt and the dust, —; but the fact is, you’d be happy in a pig-sty! I thought I could have trusted that Mrs. Closepeg with untold gold; and did you only see the hearthrug? When we left home there was a tiger in it: I should like to know who could make out the tiger, now? Oh, it's very well for you to swear at the tiger, but swearing won't revive the rug again. Else you might swear.

"You could go out and make yourself comfortable at your club. You little know how many windows are broken. How many do you think? No: I sha'n't tell you to-morrow — you shall know now. I'm sure! Talking about getting health at Margate; all my health went away directly I went into the kitchen. There's dear mother's china bowl cracked in two places. I could have sat down and cried when I saw it: a bowl I can recollect when I was a child. Eh? ["Twenty-Eighth Lecture, Mrs. Caudle has returned home. The house (of course) "Not fit to be seen." Mr. Caudle, in self-defence, takes a book," p. 141]

Commentary

Her distress, whether genuine or assumed, about the deplorable strate of the London house sets up the proposition that the Caudles consider purchasing a cottage in one of the newly-developed suburbs in "Lecture XXIX, Mrs. Caudle thinks 'The time has come to have a cottage out of town'." Her immediate response, according to Keene's illustration, is to set the maid to a vigorous dusting of the parlour. The cloud envelopes Margaret and Job Caudle so that only their heads are visible; Keene, however, offers no indication of broken windows. The illustration misses, too, Jerrold's delightful satire on John Milton and the "rubbish" he wrote —; Paradise Lost, as she conflates Milton's three marriages with Henry VIII's six: "A nice book, I think, to read in bed; and a very respectable person he was who wrote it" (146).

Bibliography

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.

Last modified 21 December 2017