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Henry Mayhew, co-founder of ‘Punch’, tells two anecdotes about the Victorian cabbie.
‘London Characters’ was a tissue of light-hearted observations on everyday life in the capital written by Henry Mayhew, co-founder of the satirical magazine ‘Punch’. Mayhew made a career out of satisfying the middle classes’ curiosity about the working man, something the working man did not always appreciate.
The defiant Mrs Partington took on the full might of the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1831, the House of Lords rejected a Bill on the reform of Parliament, sent over from the House of Commons. Sydney Smith was strongly in favour of this Bill, but told a political meeting in Taunton that he was not too worried, as the Lords had set themselves a task even harder than Mrs Partington set herself in 1824. Mrs Partington? Let the Revd Mr Smith explain...
A Welshman was not keen on handing over his employer’s money just because Tom Dorbel had a gun.
The following story was told by Captain Charles Johnson (fl. 1724-36), who is widely credited with kindling our national fascination with pirates and highwaymen. The captain tells it well but he is let down by affecting a Welsh dialect so near to being incomprehensible that I felt obliged to paraphrase the whole thing.
A much-provoked Newfoundland loses his patience.
The following story was included in a collection of anecdotes about dogs, and credited to Abraham Abell (1782-1851), a native of Cork in Ireland, member of the Royal Cork Institution, and one of the founders of the Cuvierian Society. It is told here by Edward Jesse, the man who oversaw the restoration of Hampton Court Palace and its subsequent opening to the public in 1838.
Fame found Abraham Lincoln before he was ready for the scrutiny of the camera.
The Republican Party convention in Chicago, Illinois, on May 16th-18th, 1860, nominated lawyer Abraham Lincoln as candidate for the President of the USA, with Hannibal Hamlin of Maine as his running-mate. Some three years earlier, Lincoln (who had previously represented the city in Congress) had sat for photographer Alexander Hesler in his Chicago studio.
Such was the reputation of the Prussian army in the days of the Frederick the Great that even foreigners wanted to join.
Frederick the Great ruled Prussia, in what is now northern Germany and Poland, from 1740 to 1786. He established Prussia as a serious force in European politics, and was justly proud of his troops. His army’s reputation attracted recruits from outside the country, and according to ‘Mr Addison’ (not the essayist of an earlier generation), this brought its own little embarrassments.
A little anecdote about a schoolmaster who wasn’t as much of a Wackford Squeers as he appeared to be.
Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839) firmly fixed in the public’s mind the image of the Victorian schoolmaster as a Wackford Squeers, pitilessly exploiting his pupils for labour and feeding them little more than kitchen scraps in return. The poulterer in this little anecdote seems to have fallen easily into this trap, and paid the price.