Ornamental cover design
Charles Keene
1866
cloth and gilt
21.5 cm high by 16.8 cm wide, cloth
Ornamental book-cover for Douglas Jerrold's Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures, published in 1866 by Bradbury and Evans, London.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Our duty of editorship is closed. We hope we have honestly fulfilled the task of selection from a large mass of papers. We could have presented to the female world a Lecture for Every Night in the year. Yes, —; three hundred and sixty-five separate Lectures! We trust, however, that we have done enough. And if we have armed weak woman with even one argument in her unequal contest with that imperious creature, man — if we have awarded to a sex, as Mrs. Caudle herself was wont to declare, "put upon from the beginning," the slightest means of defence —; if we have supplied a solitary text to meet any one of the manifold wrongs with which woman, in her household life, is continually pressed by her tyrannic taskmaster, man, —; we feel that we have only paid back one grain, hardly one, of that mountain of more than gold it is our felicity to owe her.
During the progress of these Lectures, it has very often pained us, and that excessively, to hear from unthinking, inexperienced men —; bachelors of course — that every woman, no matter how divinely composed, has in her ichor-flowing veins one drop —; "no bigger than a wren's eye" —; of Caudle; that Eve herself may now and then have been guilty of a lecture, murmuring it balmily amongst the rose-leaves. It may be so; still, be it our pride never to believe it. NEVER! [The Last Lecture, "Mrs. Caudle has taken cold; the Tragedy of Thin Soles," pp. 189-190]
The red-brown cover, now somewhat faded, implies the bed-time context of Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures. The elements of ornamentation include a four-poster bed with curtains and footboard, a night-light, a night-table, and a chamber pot and basin, upon which the designer (perhaps Keene himself) has jokingly placed "By C. Keene," with the artist's initial on the chamber-pot. Exposed by the partially drawn curtains, the clock on the head-board announces that the time is 11:45 P. M. The embossed half-moon and stars on the spine complete the night-time motif. For further discussion of ornate Victorian book-covers, see 'Handsomely bound in cloth': UK Book Cover Designs 1840-1880.
Left: The advertisement for the other volumes in the series, The Collected Works of Douglas Jerrold (1866). Centre: The impressive coat of arms of Bradbury and Evans, Whitefriars, Verba Sunt Pacta, or "Words constitute a contract" (page 192). Right: autumn 1866 advertisement for other commodity texts, Illustrated Gift Books, that is, gift-books for Christmas (Longmans, Green, & Co., Paternoster Row). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
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 29 December 2017
