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Mr. Caudle, having come home a little late, declares that henceforth "He will have a Key."
Charles Keene
1866
Lithograph
16.8 x 13.5 cm
Frontispiece for Douglas Jerrold's Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures (first published in 1845).
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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"You've begun by staying out till midnight. By−and−by 'twill be all night. But don't you think, Mr. Caudle, you shall ever have a key. I know you. Yes; you'd do exactly like that Prettyman, and what did he do, only last Wednesday? Why, he let himself in about four in the morning, and brought home with him his pot−companion, Puffy. His dear wife woke at six, and saw Prettyman's dirty boots at her bed-side. And where was the wretch, her husband? Why, he was drinking downstairs —; swilling. Yes; worse than a midnight robber, he'd taken the keys out of his dear wife's pockets ha! what that poor creature has to bear! and had got at the brandy. A pretty thing for a wife to wake at six in the morning, and instead of her husband to see his dirty boots!
"But I'll not be made your victim, Mr. Caudle, not I. You shall never get at my keys, for they shall lie under my pillow under my own head, Mr. Caudle. ["The Second Lecture. &mash; Mr. Caudle has been at a tavern with a friend, and is enough to poison a woman with tobacco-smoke," pp. 9-11]
The frontispiece sets the keynote, namely Job Caudle's domestic enslavement to what Victorians would have regarded as a pettycoat tyrant, the accusatory Mrs. Caudle, whose voice dominates all thirty-six lectures. Trouble is, as always brewing, as Job Caudle, mild-mannered, middle-class Londoner, arrives home a little late from the local public house, without a house key, a symbol of his longed-for independence.
In the illustration, after a night at the public house with a few male friends, Job Caudle thoughtfully retracts his umbrella and gazes at the drawn shade on the parlour window. The profile of his censorious wife, highlighted by the illumination in the front room of the modest, middle-class London house, suggests that she is lying in wait, ready to cause a scene once her aberrant spouse returns from carousing. If he is to have an hour's enjoyment, she reasons, he must pay for it with a concomitant "lecture," which, as the facing title-page vignette indicates, will involve her blathering on as her put-upon husband tries to get some sleep. Such a misogynistic portrait accompanied by Mrs. Caudle's domestic diatribes must have been much to the taste of largely male readership of Punch; or, The London Charivari in the mid-nineteenth century as it was a continuing feature over the course of 1845, and by 1866, in volume had gone through a number of editions.
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; Bradburyand 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 19 November 2017
