1803, Douglas William Jerrold was born in London on January 3. His father was Samuel Jerrold.—1809, School at Sheerness.—1813, Entered the navy as mid-shipman in December.—1816, Started life in London as a compositor.—1821, His first play, “More Frightened than Hurt,” produced at Sadlers Wells.—1824, August, married Mary Swann.—1825, Engaged at a salary to write pieces for the Coburg Theatre when wanted.—1829, “Black-Eyed Susan” and “Thomas à Becket” at the Surrey.—1838, “Men of Character” illustrated by Thackeray.—1839, “Handbook of Swindling.”—1840, Edited and partly wrote, “Heads of the People,” illustrated by Kenny Meadows.—1841, Punch started, with Jerrold as one of the principal contributors (“Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures,” “Punch’s Letters to His Son,” &c.)—1843–4, Edited the Illuminated Magazine (“Chronicles of Clovernook,” &c.)—1845–8, Edited Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine (“St. Giles and St. James;” the “Hedgehog Letters;” “Twiddlethumb Town,” &c.).—1846–8, Edited Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper (“Barber’s Chair,” &c.).—1852, Became editor of Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper.—1854, “The Heart of Gold” (the last of upwards of sixty plays), produced at the Princess’s.—1857, Died June 8.

Personal

	When I behold the false and flatter’d state
	Which all ambition points at, and survey
	The hurried pageants of the passing day,
	Where all press on to share a fleeting fate,
	Methinks the living triumphs that await
	On hours like thine might tempt the proud to stay.
	For on a green and all unworldly way,
	Thy hand hath twined the chaplet of the great,
	And the first warmth and fragrance of its fame,
	Are stealing on thy soul. The time shall be
	When men may find a music in thy name,
	To rouse deep fancies and opinions free;
	Affections fervid as the sun’s bright flame,
	And sympathies unfathom’d as the sea.

  Never did I see a handsomer head on an uglier body. Douglas Jerrold is small, with stooping shoulders; but the head placed upon those shoulders is truly magnificent. He has the head of a Jupiter on the body of a Thersites. A high, broad, cheerful, arched forehead; a very fine mouth; a well-shaped nose; clear, heaven-blue eyes; make the face of Jerrold one of the handsomest.

  My first impression was one of surprise,—not at his remarkable appearance, of which I was aware;—the eyes and mobile countenance, the stoop, and the small figure, reminding one of Coleridge, without being like him,—but at the gentle and thoughtful kindness which set its mark on all he said and did. Somehow, all his good things were so dropped as to fall into my trumpet, without any trouble or ostentation. This was the dreaded and unpopular man who must have been hated (for he was hated) as Punch and not as Jerrold,—through fear, and not through reason nor feeling. His wit always appeared to me as gentle as it was honest,—as innocent as it was sound. I could say of him as of Sydney Smith, that I never heard him say, in the way of raillery, any thing of others that I should mind his saying of me. I never feared him in the least, nor saw reason why any but knaves or fools should fear him.

  He was a very short man, but with breadth enough, and a back excessively bent,—bowed almost to deformity; very gray hair, and a face and expression of remarkable briskness and intelligence. His profile came out pretty boldly, and his eyes had the prominence that indicates, I believe, volubility of speech, nor did he fail to talk from the instant of his appearance; and in the tone of his voice, and in his glance, and in the whole man, there was something racy,—a flavor of the humorist. His step was that of an aged man, and he put his stick down very decidedly at every footfall; though as he afterwards told me that he was only fifty-two, he need not yet have been infirm…. I like Douglas Jerrold very much.

  Men who linger wistfully on the memory of that tiny frame; on that eager, radiant face; on those infantine ways, with their wonderfully subtle and elaborate guilelessness; on that ailing constitution and fiery blood; on that joyous, tender, teasing, frolicsome, thoughtful heart; must always think of him, less as the flashing wit and scathing satirist,—than as of some marvellously gifted, noble, and wayward child, the sport of nature and the delight of man. He will be recalled to those who knew and loved him, not by any big and sounding appellation, but by some affectionate and soft diminutive;—not as brilliant Douglas nor magnificent Douglas, but simply and fondly as dear Douglas.

  A man, too, of whom I will say that, let the judgment on his remaining writings be permanently what it may, and let tongues have spoken of him this or that awry, there breathed not, to my knowledge, within the unwholesome bounds of what is specially London, any one in whose actual person there was more of the pith of energy at its tensest, of that which in a given myriad anywhere distinguishes the one. How like a little Nelson he stood, dashing back his hair, and quivering for the verbal combat! The flash of his wit, in which one quality the island had not his match, was but the manifestation easiest to be observed of a mind compact of sense and information, and of a soul generous and on fire.

  There was nothing cynical nor sour in his heart, as I knew it. In the company of children and young people he was particularly happy, and showed to extraordinary advantage. He never was so gay, so sweet-tempered, so pleasing, and so pleased as then. Among my own children I have observed this many and many a time. When they and I came home from Italy, in 1845, your father went to Brussels to meet us, in company with our friends, Mr. Forster and Mr. Maclise. We all travelled together about Belgium for a little while, and all came home together. He was the delight of the children all the time, and they were his delight. He was in his most brilliant spirits, and I doubt if he were ever more humorous in his life. But the most enduring impression that he left upon us, who are grown up,—and we have all often spoken of it since—was, that Jerrold, in his amiable capacity of being easily pleased, in his freshness, in his good nature, in his cordiality, and in the unrestrained openness of his heart, had quite captivated us. Of his generosity I had a proof within these two or three years, which it saddens me to think of now. There had been an estrangement between us—not on any personal subject, and not involving an angry word—and a good many months had passed without my seeing him in the street, when it fell out that we dined each with his own separate party, in the Stranger’s Room of a club. Our chairs were almost back to back, and I took mine after he was seated and at dinner. I said not a word (I am sorry to remember), and did not look that way. Before we had sat so long, he openly wheeled his chair around, stretched out both his hands in a most engaging manner, and said aloud with a bright and loving face that I can see as I write to you, “For God’s sake let us be friends again! A life’s not long enough for this.”

  Douglas Jerrold at home, might generally be found on Sundays surrounded, not by big-wigs who would have been glad to find themselves in his society—not by old, serious professors of all branches of learning—certainly not—but by young men yet unknown to fame. He loved the buoyancy, heartiness, and the boldness of youth. It was his glory to have about him six or seven youngsters, hardly reached their majority, with whom he could talk pleasantly, and to whom he poured out his jokes, grateful for the heartiness of the reception they got from warm blood. It was the main thing about his individuality that he was himself always young. “A man is as old as he feels,” he insisted continually; and then casting back the solid flakes of his silvered hair, he would laugh and vow that few men of five-and-twenty were younger than he. His words, when he spoke seriously among his young guests, generally conveyed some generous advice, or some offer of service. Many men date their literary advancement from the study of Douglas Jerrold.

  Absurd as the bare idea of bitterness must appear in connection with such a nature as his, to those who really knew him, the reason why strangers so often and so ridiculously misunderstood him, is not difficult to discover. That marvellous brightness and quickness of perception which has distinguished him far and wide as the sayer of some of the wittiest, and often some of the wisest things also, in the English language, expressed itself almost with the suddenness of lightning. This absence of all appearance of artifice and preparation, this flash and readiness which made the great charm of his wit, rendered him, at the same time, quite incapable of suppressing a good thing from prudential considerations. It sparkled off his tongue before he was aware of it. It was always a bright surprise to himself; and it never occurred to him that it could be anything but a bright surprise to others. All his so-called bitter things were said with a burst of hearty school-boy laughter, which showed how far he was himself from attaching a serious importance to them. Strangers apparently failed to draw this inference, plain as it was; and often mistook him accordingly. If they had seen him in the society of children; if they had surprised him in the house of any one of his literary brethren who was in difficulty and distress, if they had met him by the bed-side of a sick friend, how simply and how irresistibly the gentle, generous, affectionate nature of the man would then have disclosed itself to the most careless chance acquaintance who ever misunderstood him! Very few men have won the loving regard of so many friends so rapidly, and have kept that regard so enduringly to the last day of their lives, as Douglas Jerrold.

  On the occasion of the first performance of Jerrold’s comedy of “Time Works Wonders,” I had the good fortune to occupy a seat in his private box, and I well remember his feeling of delight, at the close, when he contemplated the success he had achieved…. Arrived at the door of the hotel, I could not help repeating the gratification I felt at the author’s well-merited triumph, when Jerrold, turning his eye full upon me, and smacking his chest with his hand, exclaimed, with a degree of exultation which was most natural under the circumstances, “Yes; and here’s the little man that’s done it!”

  Douglas Jerrold worked at a desk without a speck upon it, using an inkstand in a marble shell clear of all litter, his little dog at his feet. If a comedy was in progress, he would now and then walk rapidly up and down the room, talking wildly to himself. “If it be Punch copy, you shall hear him laugh presently as he hits upon a droll bit.” And then, abruptly, the pen would be put down, and the author would pass out into the garden, and pluck a hawthorn leaf, and go nibbling it, and thinking, down the side walks; then “in again, and vehemently to work,” unrolling the thought that had come to him along little blue slips of paper, in letters smaller than the type in which they were presently to be set.

  Jerrold would perceive the germ of a retort before you had well begun to form your sentence, and would bring it forth in full blossom the instant you had done speaking. He had a way of looking straight in the face of one to whom he dealt a repartee, and with an expression of eye that seemed to ask appreciation of the point of the thing he was going to say, thus depriving it of personality or ill-nature. It was as if he called upon its object to enjoy it with him, rather than to resent its sharpness. There was a peculiar compression with a sudden curve or lift up of the lip that showed his own sense of the fun of the thing he was uttering, while his glance met his interlocutor’s with a firm unflinching roguery and an unfaltering drollery of tone that had none of the sidelong furtive look and irritating tone of usual utterers of mere rough retorts.

  His heart was as kindly a one as ever beat in a human bosom; and his hand most liberal, and often far more liberal than his means might have justified. He was once asked by a literary acquaintance, whether he had the courage, to lend him a guinea. “Oh yes,” he replied, “I’ve got the courage; but I haven’t got the guinea.” He had always the courage to do a kind action; and when he had the guinea, it was always at the command of the suffering and the distressed, especially if the sufferer from pecuniary woe was a brother of the quill, and an honest labourer in the field of literature.

  Jerrold lived to be a prosperous man; but no one ever accused him of generosity or sympathy; his wit, which, unlike that of his associate, often

“Carried a heart-stain away on its blade,”

was ever biting, bitter, and caustic, and careless as distinguishing friend from foe. Many of his brilliant bon mots and witticisms are current in literary cliques; but I have rarely heard one repeated that was not calculated to give somebody pain. Long neglect, doubtless, soured his temper, and when reputation and comparative wealth came to him—somewhat late in life, and, I believe, after years of privation—they found him, like the wholesome draught which the thunder-storm has converted into a sour and deleterious drink. Few countenances expressed a character more truthfully than did that of Jerrold; it was highly intellectual, but severe, and exceedingly sarcastic—just that of one whom a prudent man would not covet for a foe, and would hardly expect to hail as a friend.

  Jerrold’s capacity for study was enormous, and his perseverance indefatigable; night and morning he worked at Latin, French, and Italian, besides getting through a vast amount of reading.

General

  We must make a charge here, too, against our accomplished author, which we have elsewhere made more than once. He is too fond of repartee. He can bear to be told this, for he shares the fault in very illustrious company. Congreve always made wit too much the business, instead of the ornament of his comedies. In Mr. Jerrold’s dialogue passages are every now and then peeping out, which seem to have been prepared “cut and dry” for the scene. The speaker has evidently brought them with him; he has not caught them on the scene by the help of some light of dialogue or suggestion of present circumstances. We beg of Mr. Jerrold to consider this more curiously in his next production, and we beg of him to lose no time in favouring us again.

  I am truly proud of your remembrance, and have put the “Story of a Feather” on a shelf (not an obscure one) where some other feathers are, which it shall help to show mankind which way the wind blows, long after we know where the wind comes from. I am quite delighted to find that you have touched the latter part again, and touched it with such a delicate and tender hand. It is a wise and beautiful book.

  A little of his writing goes a great way. You stop very often, and do not return to the book for another dose, till next week, or so. The exceptions to this are chiefly in his acted comedies, where there is plentiful admixture of brilliant levity and stinging fun; but in all else he usually reads you a lesson of a very trying kind. Even his writings in “Punch” give you more of the baton, than the beverage “in the eye.”

	He had a sailor’s heart; ’twas thus he drew
	The sailor’s character with touch so true:
	The first that gave our stage its British tar,
	Impulsive, strenuous, both in love and war;
	With English instinct, using still his blade
	Against the strong, the weaker cause to aid.
	While Dibdin’s song on English decks is sung,
	While Nelson’s name lives on the sailor’s tongue,
	Still Susan’s tenderness and William’s faith
	Shall weave for Jerrold’s tomb a lasting wreath.

  He tried many things, and he produced much; but the root of him was that he was a humorous thinker. He did not write first-rate plays, or first-rate novels, rich as he was in the elements of playwright and novelist. He was not an artist. But he had a rare and original eye and soul,—and in a peculiar way he could pour out himself. In short, to be an essayist was the bent of his nature and genius…. Inveterately satirical as Jerrold is, he is even “spoonily” tender at the same time, and it lay deep in his character; for this wit bon vivant, the merriest and wittiest man of the company, would cry like a child as the night drew on and the talk grew serious. No theory could be more false than that he was a cold-blooded satirist—sharp as steel is sharp, from being hard. The basis of his nature was sensitiveness and impulsiveness. His wit is not of the head only, but of the heart—often sentimental, and constantly fanciful: that is, dependent on a quality which imperatively requires a sympathetic nature to give it full play. Take those Punch papers which soon helped to make Punch famous, and Jerrold himself better known. Take the “Story of a Feather” as a good expression of his more earnest and tender mood. How delicately all the part about the poor actress is worked up! How moral, how stoical the feeling that pervades it! The bitterness is healthy—healthy as bark.

  The obscure player’s son has stamped the impress of his genius upon the literature and character of his age and country, with an authentic and royal seal. Like most men who have achieved permanent fame, and won for themselves a definite status in the republic of letters, in science, or in art, he had to struggle through long years of toil, poverty, and neglect before he could command a platform high enough to compel the public to listen to him, and acknowledge the supremacy of his intellect.

  The leading characteristic of Douglas Jerrold’s nature was earnestness. He was in earnest in his abhorrence of all things mean and interested; earnest in his noble indignation at wrong and oppression; earnest in the very wit with which he vented his sense of detestation for evil-doing. He was deeply earnest in all serious things; and very much in earnest when dealing with less apparently important matters, which he thought needed the scourge of sarcasm. Any one who could doubt the earnestness of Jerrold should have seen him when a child was the topic; the fire of his eye, the quiver of his lip, bore witness of the truth of the phrase he himself uses in his charming drama of “The Schoolfellows,” showing that to him indeed “children are sacred things.”

  Were Punch and Douglas Jerrold the John the Baptists, the forerunners, of the new literature that was one of the chief means to this end? Punch from the first, under all its brightness, its bitterness, its pointed irony, its terrible, scorching sarcasm, hid a most tender heart. It took the side of the poor and the oppressed. Its sympathies were with the under dog in the fight. In its columns, unless my memory plays me false (and I am at this moment unable to verify the assumption) brilliant, mocking, tender, satirical, kindly, impetuous Douglas Jerrold published the first distinctively Christmas story.

  The subtlest wit of the century.

  His reputation as a brilliant wit, for which he himself had anything but an affection, has overshadowed his literary fame. His brightly-written essays always repay perusal, but his plays have not held the stage, and his novels are little read.

  People who speak bitterly speak in most cases from mere excess of feeling. It is much the same with Douglas Jerrold. In his imagination he spares no sarcasm to give effect to his invectives; he strives to the utmost to make each sentence as pointed as possible, nay, as one of his critics remarked, every word seems to have been especially sharpened before being used. He wrote, as Hawthorne says, with an honest and manly purpose; he was thoroughly sincere; he earnestly desired to make the world better, to lighten its suffering, and give a nobler dignity to life. But like Carlyle he lacked the higher qualities of the teacher: gentleness, forbearance, patience. He was too impulsive, too eager, too desirous of enforcing his views with peremptory sternness. An author who sees scarcely anything but the imperfection of human nature and the injustice of the world, who is so severe upon our faults, and who shows so little indulgence for our weakness, seems to take up a position outside the range of our sympathies, and thus alienates himself from his fellow men. There can be no doubt that Douglas Jerrold’s writings fail of their full effect from this cause. We feel that we are not so black as we are painted; that the world is not so selfish, so mean, and so cruel as the satirist represents. Douglas Jerrold was never as widely popular as Dickens, but during his lifetime his reputation had spread so far that he had many readers and many ardent admirers. When he died it was felt that there was a public loss. Since then his influence as a writer seems to have passed away year by year.

  A sort of very inferior Hook on the other side of politics, with a dash (also very inferior) of Hood, whose “Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures” and similar things were very popular at and a little before the middle of the century, but whose permanent literary value is of the smallest, if indeed it can be said to exist.

  Another writer very popular in his day, though now gone out like so many more, Douglas Jerrold, asked and obtained an entrance into the Magazine, where he scarcely can have found himself at home. He contributed a few of his characteristic farcical stories, and was vigorously denounced by Warren, who took the trouble to write to the Blackwoods solemnly asserting that his sole motive was of the highest kind, to implore them to put an end to contributions which were impairing the tone of the Magazine and disgusting its readers. I do not suppose this adjuration had any effect; but Jerrold’s contributions did not continue very long.