Victorian Comedy and Laughter:

Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent 1st ed.

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 Edited by
Louise Lee

Conviviality,
Jokes
& Dissent
Victorian Comedy and Laughter
 Louise Lee
Editor

Victorian Comedy
and Laughter
Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent
Editor
Louise Lee
Department of English
and Creative Writing
University of Roehampton
London, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-57881-5 ISBN 978-1-137-57882-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2

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 Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Jane Darcy, who organised the ‘Victorian Comedy’

Conference at University College London, from which many of these
articles are drawn, and to the contributors for their enthusiasm, patience
and good humour. I am greatly indebted, too, to Milena Kozic, friend
and former Ph.D. student at King’s College London, who has acted
as an invaluable consultant and assistant on this book, and to Alastair
Sherwood, without whose help it might never have been finished.
Thanks, also, to Camille Davies, Shaun Vigil and Rebecca Hinsley at
Palgrave for steering it wisely and kindly to completion. The students of
the third-year undergraduate course Laughing Victorians at Roehampton
University, London, deserve a special mention for their many excellent
ideas and insights. Much gratitude, too, to my husband Johnny Lee
and daughter Georgina for their wisecracking fun and encouragement.
This book is dedicated to my parents Carole and Charles Walker—both
consummately good gigglers—and to the memory of my brother, Sam
Walker (1966–2015), whose awesome puns are missed every day.

v
 Contents

Introduction: Victorian Comedy and

Laughter—Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent 1
Louise Lee

Conviviality

Laughter and Conviviality 37

Malcolm Y. Andrews

Brutal Buffoonery and Clown Atrocity: Dickens’s

Pantomime Violence 49
Jonathan Buckmaster

Edward Lear’s Travels in Nonsense and Europe 75

Peter Swaab

Jokes

‘Capital Company’: Writing and Telling Jokes

in Victorian Britain 109
Bob Nicholson

vii
viii CONTENTS

George Eliot’s Jokes 141

Louise Lee

The Game of Words: A Victorian Clown’s Gag-Book

and Circus Performance 187
Ann Featherstone

‘Sassin’ Back’: Victorian Serio-Comediennes

and Their Audiences 207
Louise Wingrove

‘Deliberately Shaped for Fun by the High Gods’:

Little Tich, Size and Respectability in the Music Hall 235
Oliver Double

Dissent

Laughing Out of Turn: Fin de Siècle Literary Realism

and the Vernacular Humours of the Music Hall 265
Peter T. A. Jones

What Was New About the ‘New Humour’?: Barry Pain’s

‘Divine Carelessness’ 291
Jonathan Wild

Just Laughter: Neurodiversity in Oscar Wilde’s ‘Pen,

Pencil and Poison’ 309
Matthew Kaiser

Bibliography 329

Index 351
 Notes on Contributors

Malcolm Y. Andrews is an Emeritus Professor of Victorian and Visual

Arts at the University of Kent. He is currently Editor of The Dickensian,
the journal of the Dickens Fellowship, and has published on Dickens and
on landscape art.
Jonathan Buckmaster is an Honorary Research Fellow at the
University of Buckingham and Associate Editor of Dickens Journals
Online. He was awarded his doctorate for his thesis on Charles Dickens
and the pantomime clown in February 2013. This work reinterprets
Dickens’s Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (1838) and examines a number
of Dickens’s comic figures in relation to the tropes of pantomime. His
monograph, Dickens’s Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the
Pantomime of Life, has recently been published by Edinburgh University
Press (2019).
Oliver Double is a Reader in Drama at the University of Kent. He is
the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (1997), Britain had
Talent: A History of Variety Theatre (2012) and Getting the Joke: The
Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (2nd edition, 2014), and he is the
co-editor of Popular Performance (2017). In 2013, he established the
British Stand-Up Comedy Archive, and is the creator and co-presenter of
a podcast based on the items it contains, A History of Comedy in Several
Objects.

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Ann Featherstone is an Honorary Research Fellow in Theatre History

in the Department of Drama at the University of Manchester. Her
research interests have always been located in nineteenth-century popular
entertainment. She has contributed chapters and articles on the Victorian
portable theatre, pantomime, theatrical advertising and circus. With
Professor Jacky Bratton, she co-wrote The Victorian Clown (CUP, 2006)
and edited The Journals of Sydney Race 1892–1900: A Provincial View
of Popular Entertainment (2007) for the Society for Theatre Research,
where she is a member of the Publications Committee. She has written
two novels, published by John Murray, set in the world of Victorian cir-
cus and music hall. She has contributed to BBC television programmes
on music hall and circus and has recently appeared on Who Do You Think
You Are?
Peter T. A. Jones teaches at the New College of the Humanities at
Northeastern and Queen Mary. His work examines the discursive inter-
section between literary culture, popular entertainment and urban local-
ity during the nineteenth century. Peter has published on the history of
street markets and is working on two books examining the rise of cock-
ney popular culture and the creative history of railway arches. Peter is an
Editorial Fellow at History Workshop Online and Vice-President of the
Literary London Society. He co-ordinated ‘Stray Voices’, a research net-
work which explored the unsettled history of homelessness.
Matthew Kaiser is Associate Professor and Chair of English at
University of California, Merced. He is the author of The World in Play:
Portraits of a Victorian Concept (Stanford UP, 2012), the translator of
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (Cognella, 2017), and the
editor of seven books, including the forthcoming A Cultural History of
Comedy in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Louise Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University
of Roehampton, London. She is completing a monograph, The Call to
Levity: Laughter, Evolution & the Victorian Literary Imagination 1830–
1910 (forthcoming Oxford University Press and the British Academy,
2021), and with Martin Priestman, co-edited a special edition of
Romanticism on the Net, ‘Evolution and Literature: The Two Darwins’
(2016). She has published essays on Emily Brontë, Charles Kingsley and
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and with Mark Knight co-edited Religion,
Literature and the Imagination: Sacred Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2010).
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Bob Nicholson is a Reader in History and the Digital Humanities

at Edge Hill University in the UK. He works on the history of
nineteenth-century popular culture, with a particular focus on jokes,
­
journalism, popular entertainment and transatlantic relations. His
research appears in publications such as the Journal of Victorian Culture,
Media History, the Victorian Periodicals Review and across a range of
edited collections. He is currently working with the British Library on a
project that aims to create a digital archive of one million historical jokes,
starting with material from the Victorian era. He tweets @DigiVictorian.
Peter Swaab is a Professor of English Literature at University College
London. He is the editor of ‘Over the Land and Over the Sea’: Selected
Nonsense and Travel Writings of Edward Lear (Carcanet, 2005), and fur-
ther essays on Lear. With Philip Horne, he edited Thorold Dickinson: A
World of Film (Manchester University Press, 2008) while his other publi-
cations include a BFI Film Classics book, Bringing Up Baby (2010), and
The Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought (Palgrave, 2012). He is currently
writing a book on Sylvia Townsend Warner.
Jonathan Wild is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the
University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on late Victorian and
Edwardian topics and is author of The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary
Culture, 1880–1939 (Palgrave, 2006), and Literature of the 1900s: The
Great Edwardian Emporium (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
Louise Wingrove is an independent Researcher who received her Ph.D.
in Performance History from the University of Bristol. Her research
focuses on re-imagining and reclaiming the repertoires, careers and
image cultivation of music hall and vaudeville serio-comediennes on
British and Australian stages.
 List of Figures

Edward Lear’s Travels in Nonsense and Europe

Fig. 1 A nest in one of my own olive trees (Later Letters of Edward
Lear, edited by Lady Strachey [London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1911], 122) 78
Fig. 2 A was an ant (Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets
[London: Robert John Bush, 1871], n.p.) 81
Fig. 3 M was a Mouse (Edward Lear drawing for ‘M was a Mouse’
from ‘An original nonsense alphabet made for Miss Lushington,’
ca. 1865. MS Typ 55.3. Image courtesy of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Web:
https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:51101168$14i) 82
Fig. 4 There was a young lady of Sweden (A Book of Nonsense [London:
Frederick Warne and Co, 1846; eighteenth edition, 1866], 100) 84
Fig. 5 There was an old person of Ems (A Book of Nonsense
[eighteenth edition, 1866], 107) 85
Fig. 6 There was a Young Lady whose bonnet (A Book of Nonsense
[London: Frederick Warne and Co, third enlarged edition,
1861], 5) 87
Fig. 7 Ramphastas Toco (John Gould, A Monograph of the
Ramphastidae, or Family of Toucans [1834]) 88
Fig. 8 There was an old man whose despair (More Nonsense, Pictures,
Rhymes, Botany, Etc. [London: Robert John Bush, 1872], n.p.) 91
Fig. 9 There was an old person of Grange (More Nonsense, Pictures,
Rhymes, Botany, Etc. [London: Robert John Bush, 1872], n.p.) 92

xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES

‘Capital Company’: Writing and Telling Jokes in Victorian

Britain
Fig. 1 The reprinting of jokes from Punch, 4 October 1884. Shaded
squares indicate the presence of a particular joke in a specific
paper. The numbers inside each shaded box indicate the
sequences in which jokes were printed by these papers 130
 Introduction: Victorian Comedy
and Laughter—Conviviality,
Jokes and Dissent

Louise Lee

‘Fagin, do look at him! I can’t bear it; it is such a jolly game, I can’t bear it.
Hold me, somebody, while I laugh it out.’ With this irrepressible ebullition
of mirth, Master Bates laid himself flat on the floor: and kicked convulsively
for five minutes, in an ecstasy of facetious joy. (Charles Dickens, Oliver
Twist, 1837–9)

Why does Charley Bates laugh? The answer seems straightforward enough:
the newly genteel attire of Oliver Twist, a recent guest of the Brownlows,
now back in Fagin’s den, causes a surge of ‘facetious joy’. And yet, this
appears to be only a partial answer. For Charley is helplessly, hap-
lessly, hopelessly, laid to waste by laughter in a way that is not quite fully
accounted for by the circumstances. ‘Hold me, somebody, while I laugh
it out’, he pleads. And, if we take Dickens at his word, Charley spends a
full five minutes, lying on the floor, kicking his legs in the air, in a kind
of joyfully fetal re-imagining of Oliver’s far more ghastly entrance into the
world. ‘It is such a jolly game’, Charley cries breathlessly between convul-
sions, ‘I can’t bear it’.1

L. Lee (*)
Department of English and Creative Writing,
University of Roehampton, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 1

L. Lee (ed.), Victorian Comedy and Laughter,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57882-2_1
2 L. LEE

Bearing it. The Victorian novel, and indeed Victorian culture more
generally, is interested in such unbearable moments, but cannot quite
contain them, nor indeed depict them. For it is a contradictory aspect
of laughter that despite an undeniable corporeal reality that qualifies
it to be considered, in the words of one critic, as an ‘event’ in its own
right (rather than merely a response to something), it is too quickly
over, too summarily haunted by its own pastness, even before the last
sigh and whimper of amusement fades away and equanimity is restored.2
This fragility of representation, caught between what Anca Parvulescu
calls the robust and affirmative ‘now’ of laughter, but also its amnesiac
and passifying propensities, is one reason (among many) why it is both
under-determined and over-determined in the Victorian novel, and
indeed, in Victorian studies more generally.3 It is also perhaps, why, as
James Kincaid suggests, modern critics read a novel like Oliver Twist and
laugh along to its scabrously funny scenes, yet end up writing essays on
its ‘bleak effects’.4
A similar ellipsis between the experience of laughter, and its textual
remediation, occurs at the end of the Victorian period in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897), where ‘King Laugh’ is enigmatically transformed into a
force described by vampire-hunter Professor Abraham Van Helsing, as,
like death, both unconquerable, but also quixotic: ‘When King Laugh
come he make them all dance to the tune he plays’. Laughter is depicted
here as a sovereign force visiting the body, rather than coming from
within it, while Van Helsing’s quasi-prophetic and quasi-Biblical lan-
guage (‘come’) renders it as determinedly unknowable, even ineffable:
a laughing sublime that resists interpretation.5 The n ­ ineteenth-century
thinker who most closely captured this fugitive sense of laughter’s
infinite and endlessly replicating multiplicities, but also its strange immu-
tability, was Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in the work that proclaimed the
death of Judeo-Christianity’s God, The Gay Science (1882), also pur-
sued laughter, or what Sara Crangle has termed ‘risibility’, as a tool of
self-knowledge:

At times we need to have a rest from ourselves by looking at and down at

ourselves and, from an artistic distance, laughing at ourselves or crying at
ourselves; we have to discuss the hero no less than the fool in our passion
for knowledge; we must now and then be pleased about our folly in order
[…] to stay pleased about our wisdom […] nothing does us as much good
as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves[…].6
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 3

The glorious understatement of ‘need[ing] to have a rest from

ourselves’—with all the inanition and weariness of consciousness it
implies—is certainly one of the meanings that can be applied to Van
Helsing, who often appears unconscionably strung out in the novel. Yet
it seems insufficient to fully do justice to the boyish vitality of Charley
Bates, depicted three generations earlier, whose ‘ecstasy’ is not quite
the Nietzschean ‘self-tickling’ limned by Crangle; the autonomous and
subjective laughter that is ‘associated with divinity’ and a desire for ‘the
infinite’ that ‘transcend[s] our brief existences’.7
But, then, in the sixty years that elapsed between Charley’s giddy
‘ebullition of mirth’ in the 1830s, and Van Helsing’s far more compro-
mised iteration of it in the 1890s, laughter grew up or grew down. It
became more eerily freighted with dreams of the social, but also with the
private and personal, and bearing witness to these shifts in tone, value
and feeling, is a commitment shown by all the contributors of Victorian
Comedy and Laughter: Conviviality, Jokes and Dissent. The essays pre-
sented here embrace many disciplines from literature, science, aesthetics,
performance studies, philosophy, cultural studies and materialist cultures
of the body. They underscore the profound interest Victorians had in
laughter as a force of social cohesion, but also as a marker of charged
subjectivity, and also replicate the experience of writing about laughter
that the Victorians themselves encountered: that in an age of emergent
professional methodologies, it is often necessary to trespass on other dis-
ciplines to talk about it. Yet laughter is good to think with, as the many
disciplinary co-trespassers of this collection show, and, as the many emi-
nent Victorians who wrote on the subject acknowledged, from Dickens
himself to Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Bain, Leslie Stephen, George
Eliot, George Meredith, Charles Darwin, G. H. Lewes and James Sully
(to name but a few).
None of the contributors to this volume would subscribe to what
might be termed, borrowing from Michel Foucault, the ‘repressive
hypothesis’ of Victorian laughter perpetuated in Western culture dur-
ing the first half of the twentieth century: that is, the widespread belief
that Victorians were either too glum or uptight to laugh.8 The ‘turn to
affect’ and the rise in performance studies in the past thirty years has put
a final stake in the heart of that particular critical revenant. And indeed,
we might go even further in reversing this paradigm and say that, read-
ing from the breadth of essays presented here, the Victorians were the
first age to experience the kind of modernity which is close to our own
4 L. LEE

today, punctuated by laugh-out-loud moments produced in response

to an exponentially expanding mass culture. By the 1860s and 1870s,
laughter was part of everyday Victorian life through myriad platforms:
from periodicals such as Punch, Fun and Judy, to late-century magazines
like ­Pick-Me-Up and Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, to comic novels, songs
and poetry, nonsense fiction and burlesques, to endless squibs, spoofs
and parodies, and to the gags, ditties and ‘patter’ of fin de siècle music-
hall comedians and comediennes, circus clowns and the proponents of
‘New Humour’.
But not only did the Victorians conspicuously enjoy laughter, they
also, to re-deploy further Foucauldian vernacular, transformed it into dis-
course. By the 1870s, a national debate was being staged across provincial
and metropolitan periodicals and journals about the nature of laughter,
its causes, targets and effects. Today, though, we might miss some of the
heterogeneity of this dialogue because a large portion of it, excluding the
notable contributions by those mentioned above, was distinguished by
its commonplace un-distinguishability. As R. B. Martin observed, in still
one of the best books to be written on the subject, The Triumph of Wit
(1974), the ‘large group of writings’ on n ­ ineteenth-century laughter and
comedy was conducted in an echo chamber of ‘tediously familiar’ material,
often plagiarised and re-heated, without any accompanying analysis. As
Martin observes, ‘the vague tickle of a phrase may drive one to locate the
source from which the echo emanates, only to find that phrases, sentences,
paragraphs have been shamelessly lifted’.9
This critical or rather un-critical state of affairs in Victorian middle-
brow writing about laughter was further compounded by a literary
‘protocol’ that Nicholas Dames has recently discussed: the use of the
prolonged textual excerpt in reviews. As Dames argues, the concept of
the twenty-first-century ‘close reading’ has been enshrined from the
mid-twentieth century onwards in a privileged position in the academy,
and requires the critic to engage with the ‘higher literacy that scholars
are enjoined to teach’ in universities. But the pervasive Victorian habit,
on the other hand, of deploying ‘lengthy inset quotations’ with lit-
tle accompanying critical commentary results in a form of appreciation
that, by Dames’s account, is also ‘utterly innocuous’. ‘Innocuous’, as
Dames says, because, as a ‘protocol’, it is ‘neither innovative’ nor ‘scan-
dalous’ and entails little professional risk. But the risky aspect of writ-
ing about laughter and comedy is that it requires creativity, and often
a world view, and rendering the experience only implicitly (rather than
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 5

explicitly) by merely quoting a text’s ‘amusing’ parts under-explains,

even effaces, its complications.10 As Rachel Ablow comments on this
kind of critical excerpt, it proffers an illustrative ‘“see, it feels [italics
added] this way”’ interpretation rather than a more analytic ‘“see, it
works this way” epistemology of close reading […]’. This ‘feelings’
approach, while valuable of itself, renders often unsaid and tantalisingly
beyond reach, any sustained collective discussion regarding laughter’s
ontological, aesthetic or ethical implications.11
This does take us back to the perennial problem about laughter,
though, both in the case of the Victorians, specifically, but also, histori-
cally: how to adduce meaning, through language, to a phenomenon that
is fundamentally a-textual, even anti-textual. And writings on the sub-
ject have often been characterised by evasion and velleity: from famously,
Aristotle’s lost second book on laughter and comedy from The Poetics—
which forms the basis of the plot of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the
Rose—to, for example, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus’s, planned
but not undertaken An Examination of Wit, to a number of other
works and treatises, half-finished or un-written.12 For one of the trick-
ier aspects of laughter, as with Charley Bates’s ‘mirthful’ outburst above,
is its unfailing tendency to start as one thing and to become another.
To compare, one need only look at the complex responses provoked by
the enormously successful cross-class phenomenon, Douglas Jerrold’s
Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures (1845), little read or studied today, but
which sustained Punch’s financial fortunes in the 1840s, in which a hen-
pecked husband is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife’s tongue.13
The trials and tribulations of Job Caudle, with all its hilarities, but also,
importantly, its labile sympathies between husband and wife, render an
uncanny sense that what seemed like moments of knowledge or cer-
tainty, are not; and what’s more, the perception of this arises, not in any
earth-shaking revelation, but through an aggregate of minor, comic,
but also increasingly painful glimpses at other truths, in which laughter
appears to fall back on, and into, itself. But then, as Parvulescu observes:

To read in laughter’s archive is to decipher nuances. It is a voyage into the

microscopic, into the difference of the bit of nuance. It is also an exer-
cise in closeness, in intimacy. Close reading or close listening is intimate
reading. An infinite spectrum of nuances—tones, timbres, accents, reso-
nances—unfold in laughter. And yet we do not quite have a vocabulary to
talk about laughter.14
6 L. LEE

The ‘vocabulary’ that evades laughter then refers to language but also
to the possession of a resilient-enough affective and critical repertoire to
talk about laughter when faced with the inordinate amount of questions
it generates: for it requires the theorist of laughter (and that may mean
everyone, for after Freud, we all theorise our own laughter in the way
we do our own dreams) to invite a state of negative capability, and of
intellectual uncertainty. In a bid to vitiate this state of unknowingness,
or not-fully-knowingness, Erasmus Darwin even proposed a grammati-
cal mark—an inverted question mark—to connote irony.15 Yet, as with
irony, to engage with the experience of laughter itself, it is also necessary
to invert questions, and send any answers right back, with even more
questions. For laughter is not ‘innocuous’, even if some of the apprecia-
tive, though muted, responses to it in the Victorian period, were.
But then there must be a caveat in modern scholarship, too, about
any treatment of Victorian laughter which falsely renders aspects of the
discussion ‘innocuous’ or amorphous when it is not. For, in the absence
of a commonality of language on the subject, and indeed, when refer-
ring to a critical world before such useful aids to modern thinking about
laughter as the vernacular of psychology, and even modern literary crit-
icism itself, Victorian usages of cognate terms that surround laughter
like ‘wit’, ‘humour’, ‘comedy’, the ‘incongruous’, and ‘fancy’ provide
a much-needed control mechanism to track laughter’s changing rela-
tion to subjectivity. If these cultural templates appear to some extent
­pre-formed, and even recondite, or outmoded, they are certainly never
static, for it is at such acute marginals of difference that culture is made
and re-made. It is not pettifogging, therefore, to linger on the contrast,
say, between William Hazlitt, writing in 1819, about wit as ‘the salt of
conversation, not the food’,16 and Walter Pater’s surprisingly religious
and dissonantal echoing of Ecclesiastes, proposing in 1878, that wit
is ‘that unreal and transitory mirth, which is as the crackling of thorns
under the pot’.17 Whether Victorians aphorise or flatten out the expe-
rience of laughter, or else, endow it with agelastic (or laughter-fearing)
Biblical connotations, tells much in miniature about its pressure points in
relation to autonomy, individualism and the social.
Yet listening, or close-listening, to Victorian debates about laughter
from the vantage point of the twenty-first century often obliges us to
fall back on what Parvulescu terms ‘description’, which, as she observes,
gets a bad press for ornateness and ‘detail’, and also, after André Breton,
for ‘naïvité’ because of its implicit claims about an ‘unmediated relation
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 7

to the real’.18 Swap the word ‘real’ for ‘vitality’, however, and the stakes
are changed, for in those ‘descriptive’ moments, a world that might seem
irrecoverably lost to the past’s vortices, is suddenly, and briefly, revivified,
not through access to the material realm though, but rather to the fleet-
ing one: to reverse Karl Marx’s famous reflection from The Communist
Manifesto (1848), all that is melted into air becomes momentarily solid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson caught both this sense of laughter’s ‘melting-
ness’ and also its materiality when he visited London in 1847, and
observed: ‘It is a new trait of the nineteenth century that the wit and
humor of England,—as in Punch, so in the humorists, Jerrold,
Dickens, Thackeray, Hood,—have taken the direction of humanity and
freedom’.19 To laugh in the world is to imagine new ‘directions’, new
ontologies, into which that laughter might belong. And whether this
impulse is radical or conservative—or both—to see life through com-
edy is to resist what Robert Pfaller has called Western culture’s ‘subtle
hegemony of the tragic’.20
This collection is thus organised around new ‘directions’ for com-
edy and laughter staged across the three generations of the Victorian
period: the first concerns ‘Conviviality’ (1837–1870), the utopian dream
of laughing togetherness that emerges from within a system of liter-
ary production but also reaches beyond it; the second, ‘Jokes’ (1850–
1890), concerns the rise-on-rise of a textual (and age-old oral) form to
rival even the pre-eminence of the Victorian three-decker novel, and
traces the joke’s hyper-transmissibility and multiple formulations in
Victorian print culture, and also on the nineteenth-century stage; and
the final section, ‘Dissent’ (1870–1900), traces how in the latter part of
the ­nineteenth-century ‘joke culture’, now embedded in Victorian life,
reaches towards new punchlines and new voices.

1  Conviviality
The volume begins with Malcolm Andrews’s argument for the redemp-
tive power of laughter in Dickens’s early novels as a force that brings
‘together ideas and people that cultural habit and social conformity have
separated’. If, as Marx argued, under conditions of capitalism ‘all that is
holy is profaned’,21 the logic of Andrews’s argument in ‘Laughter and
Conviviality’, suggests a new locale for the sacred: the laughing inter-
personal. But there is a caveat, as Andrews observes, for it must be the
‘right [italics added] sort of merriment’. This phrase is Dickens’s own,
8 L. LEE

and comes from a representative scene, in Chapter Six of Pickwick Papers

(1836–1837), during the playing of the card game Pope Joan at Dingley
Dell, where, as Andrews observes, ‘the euphoria’ and ‘community laugh-
ter […] run[s] on a loop’.22
What Andrews pursues specifically in regard to this animated tab-
leau is a distinctive form of phenomenological fun, which Dickens
states, comes from ‘the heart and not the lips’. This may not necessarily
include (although it doesn’t actually preclude) the verbal contrivances of
the scene—the ‘jokes’ being rehearsed by Mr. Winkle to the assembled
throng—which, we are told, are ‘very well known in town, but […] not
at all known in the country’.23 But it does most decidedly embrace what
Andrews calls the ‘heady conviviality’, the feeling of all-inclusive intersti-
tial connectedness—the ‘social glue’—which lies within the scene’s, and
indeed, conviviality’s, ‘core meaning [of] living together’. Conviviality
has two main impetuses, as Andrews argues: the first is a theoretical one,
and owes much to that highly influential and also improbable (consider-
ing his later reputation as a jeremiad) theorist of early Victorian humour,
Thomas Carlyle. Re-scripting the Romantic writer Jean Paul Richter’s
theory of the ‘inverse sublime’, Carlyle praised the welcoming spirit of
humour which eschews the artifice and cleverness of wit in favour of a
humane and even lachrymose fondness: for him, ‘true humour’ exalts
‘into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into
our affections what is above us’, and it manifests itself in ‘warm, tender
fellow-feeling with all forms of existence’.24
The extent of this democratic togetherness, as Andrews suggests, is
realised in Pickwick Papers, in many ‘manic’ scenes of laughter, and
also, even, from a ground-up textual level by grammatical devices such
as polysyndeton, in which multiple clauses are conjoined, and through
breathless repetitive refrains, which underwrite the ‘emphatic bind[ing]
together’ of the novel’s ‘disparate’ energies. As Andrews asserts ‘[pol-
ysyndeton] is the appropriate rhetorical instrument for generating
community and conviviality—which are themselves forms of social con-
junction’. But this takes Andrews towards a new consideration of how
conviviality might operate in terms of Dickens’s authorial s­ elf-fashioning,
orchestrating the responses of his new and heterogeneous reader-
ship in the 1830s: ideas which have particular resonance with regards
to Pickwick Papers and the bold new experiment of serial publication.
A number of critics have addressed this issue, particularly in regard to
Benedict Anderson’s paradigmatic concept of the simultaneity or the
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 9

‘meanwhile’ of print periodical time, and its creation of imagined

communities, with Dickens writing as if inhabiting one intimate and con-
genial domestic space—the hearth—addressing his readers in another.25
Andrews builds on these palliative thematics but also conjures a far more
frenetic hearth, and a far more frenetic Dickens. As he suggests:

I think of such techniques [as those displayed in Pickwick Papers] as the

literary equivalent of Dickens’s behaviour at family dancing parties.
According to his daughter Mamie’s account, even when Dickens was not
dancing, ‘he would insist upon the sides keeping up a kind of jig step, and
clapping his hands to add to the fun, and dancing at the backs of those
whose enthusiasm he thought needed rousing, and was himself never still
for a moment.’26 […]So Dickens dances at our backs rhetorically to rouse
us into joining the festive community of his characters. He is then not only
the author of the novel we are reading: he is also our insistently genial
party host. Dickensian conviviality is not just what happens in the pages of
his novels; it is a community event, bringing author, characters and readers
into one big festivity.

The dancing author, the genial host, both mirroring and exhorting
his readers to take part in the festive fun, not only through the kinetic
revivals to readerly energy produced by multiple jokes, quips, comic
asides, misdirects and funny anecdotes, but also through what Andrews
observes is a kind of suggestive textual determinism, particularly evident
in the Pope Joan scene, where ‘the repetition of the words “laughter”
or “merriment,” supply[…] the keynote and the refrain’, acting as an
exuberant recitative, a physiological call to linking arms of the perpet-
ual renewal of laughing togetherness. Andrews’s conception of Dickens’s
party poetics comes close to the form of authorship that Roland Barthes
describes in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), as ‘writing aloud’; one that
produces ‘pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where
we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the volup-
tuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the
body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.’27
There are implications, here, for Pickwick Papers, a novel which is
characterised by its sprawling, messy, indeterminacy, and where, as John
Bowen has observed, the written world of ‘papers’, notes, letters, and
apparently illegible inscriptions, is subject to misreading, over-reading
and editorialising; and where voices, too, with their multifarious hum-
bugs, intrigues and stratagems, are just as unreliable.28 In this world,
10 L. LEE

to laugh along with Dickens—to be, as Andrews puts it, ‘roused’ to his
­‘jig-step’—represents a value of itself: it is to be aware of one’s own heav-
ing body, but also to forget oneself temporarily. Through conviviality,
Dickens ‘writing aloud’ as the somaticised author, emerging from within
the disparate papers of his first novel, inaugurates the ‘reading aloud’ of
his somaticised readers.
But while it might be tempting to consider that laughter here rep-
resents a vestigial trace of the ‘natural’, there is an extent to which, as
Andrews suggests, it requires ‘coaxing’. Such benign coercions means
that small resistances are spotted, but then overcome, and that readers,
like the characters in the Pope Joan scene, are ‘laughed out’ of their
private tensions and worries, or led to laughter through, what Andrews
calls a series of ‘calculated shocks,’ which ‘break down [the reader’s]
sober detachment.’29 The limits of this detachment are what Jonathan
Buckmaster explores in ‘Brutal Buffoonery and Clown Atrocity:
Dickens’s Pantomime Violence’. As he details, Dickens was once asked,
in a purifying corrective spirit that is still recognisable today, to pen a
new and morally improving version of Punch and Judy, but declined,
characterising both the puppet show (and also the pantomimes that he
had grown up with) as ‘extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which
would lose [their] hold upon people if [they] were made moral and
instructive’.30 Such entertainments were ‘quite harmless’ in their influ-
ence, he said, consisting of ‘outrageous joke[s] which no-one […] would
think of regarding as an incentive to any course of action, or a model of
any kind of conduct’.31
The lack of piety is refreshing, but as Buckmaster notes, this rela-
tion changed throughout Dickens’s career, as audiences progressively
became more squeamish about such stock feats of Georgian panto-
mime as mock-babies squashed flat to look like pancakes, or Pantaloon
the clown being chased by red-hot pokers. By the 1860s, as Buckmaster
notes, slapstick moments like these became ‘something [both] to relish
and to repudiate’. This is a negotiation that also plays out in the clown’s
onstage and on-page antics in Dickens’s works, which produces what
Buckmaster calls a ‘double palliative’, combining ‘the communal laugh-
ter of a shared humanity’ with ‘the retributive laughter of an oppressor
brought low’.
Yet while the cultural work of slapstick in the polyphonic space of the
Victorian novel (and in Victorian culture more broadly), still remains
a relatively under-developed field, Buckmaster is highly attentive to
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 11

the ways in which specific techniques such as pantomime ‘slosh’ scenes

are textualised, and re-interpreted, in Dickens’s novels.32 What such
tableaux demonstrate, as he asserts, is the clown, not as a periph-
eral, but as a central, figure in the Dickensian imagination; and, also,
as is limned in tales of suffering clowns in Pickwick Papers, as a worker,
who like other workers in Victorian modernity, endures bodily hard-
ships—and slapstick is a sign of this. The clown in Dickens’s work can
be read as a comic hierophant of an aesthetic that heralds new relations
between self and community, positing a parallel world, that Dickens
calls ‘pantomime time’,33 which, like the elastic body of the clown,
demonstrates its own extendable logic, while inflecting and changing
the everyday.
Buckmaster’s interests in discrete comic worlds—but ones that
also re-direct animus towards new ways of thinking about the quotid-
ian—talks to conviviality of a specifically generic kind in Peter Swaab’s
‘Edward Lear’s Travels in Nonsense and Europe’. As Swaab suggests,
Lear’s works start by ‘exploit[ing] the relation between sense and non-
sense’, and end by ‘calling a new realm into being’. Lear’s topographic
imaginary is built on tensions, as Swaab details, both fugitive and
home-loving, pivoting between ‘questing’ and ‘nesting’. And, as with
Dickens, the textual dream of a utopian community is powered by a per-
ennial and incurable sense of ‘outsiderliness’. But while Victorian non-
sense writing has often been read as an analogue of the imperial project,
Lear’s terms of engagement are naturally more horizontal and resistant
to such ‘hermetic positions’, and, from within this maelstrom of messy
hybridities and cluttered everythings, rich possibilities arise for new rela-
tions and affiliations, crossing boundaries between human and animal;
between animate and inanimate. As Swaab suggests about Lear’s works:
‘Bringing creatures unprecedentedly together is something nonsense
writing can do’.
As with other writing in this edition, the comic never quite deserts
seriousness, but finds new ways to interrogate and express it, playfully
deploying multiple perspectives and literary forms—often short ones.
Taking up Lear’s limericks written across thirty years, from A Book
of Nonsense in 1846, and More Nonsense in 1872, Swaab argues: ‘Though
brief they are not trifling’. The resonance of the limerick triumphs
even when it is formally, as Adam Mars-Jones notes, ‘oddly unsatis-
fying’ like ‘a bicycle with stabilisers’—ending, as it often does, with a
repeated rhyme.34 But this perennial state of a purposively self-thwarting
12 L. LEE

­ n-development in the rhythm of Lear’s work may be one of his

u
wisdoms, as it relocates agonistic emphasis elsewhere: for, in not being
fully grown-up, there are different potentials for adulthood. As Swaab
suggests, ‘nonsenses are dreams of metamorphosis. In them [Lear] ima-
gines ways of not being human, but being still a happy creature’.
But it is as a traveller, as Swaab notes, that Lear’s nonsense ­characters,
and indeed perhaps Lear himself, makes most sense, particularly in his
journals across the Abruzzi, Calabria and Albania—which still remain
under-studied—but which feature a number of Lear episodes (in what
Swaab calls comic ‘Pickwickian’ mode) in which traveller and indigenous
inhabitant are mutually and reciprocally involved in exploring language,
food and customs, and finding ‘each is an object of energetic wonder-
ment to the other’. This is no cool-headed anthropological exercise or
experiment, however: in one scene at Episkopì, described in his Albanian
journal, Lear finds a river full of watercresses, and immediately starts to
eat them (accompanied by hunks of bread and cheese), much to the con-
vulsed amusement of the local population, who waggishly supply a selec-
tion of equally strange accompaniments for the ‘oddball’ Englishman’s
dining experience—including handfuls of grass and a grasshopper. As
Swaab comments:

They become friends not in a conventional traveller’s way by learning to

understand each other’s ways—and not via the explorations of history and
archaeology and textiles which the journals also include —but from shouts
of laughter, from exulting in their differences. The world of difference is
the condition of friendship.

2   Jokes
The joke, too, can be seen as a form of traveller in the Victorian period,
albeit a hyperactive and unruly one. For, in the age of the voluminous
three-decker novel, or what Henry James famously called ‘large, loose,
baggy monsters’, there is the pithy and piercing effect of a joke, which,
given its formal qualities of condensation and contraction, threat-
ens, as an impudent arriviste, Victorian culture’s most pre-eminent lit-
erary construct—with an after-shock increasingly felt as part of a wider
­pan-European and transatlantic phenomenon.35 As Freud remarks, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, in The Joke and Its Relation to the
Unconscious (1905):
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 13

A new joke has almost the same effect as an event of the widest interest; it
is passed on from one to another like the news of the latest victory. Even
great men who think it worth their while to tell us of their education, what
cities and lands they have seen, and what outstanding people they have
met, do not scorn to include in their memoirs the fact that they have heard
this or that excellent joke.36

Although, as Daniel Wickberg has shown, the joke is, of itself,

nothing new to Britain, having been a feature of national life since the
‘classical ana and collections of facetiae’ and ‘jestbooks of the early mod-
ern’ era, what does provide the distinct difference in the Victorian age is
its excessive mercantile transmissibility: the new and myriad pathways for
dissemination through exponentially expanding local, national and inter-
national print cultures, theatrical performances, circuses and revues.37
For what began life as a figure of oral and folk culture, as Wickberg has
shown, becomes, like many other commodities in the period, produced
on an ever-expanding scale—industrialised even—with the voracious
appetite for new material often outstripping supply.
And it is the implications of this new phenomenon, particularly the
tensions it produces with regard to the nature of authorship, that Bob
Nicholson discusses in his essay, ‘“Capital Company”: Writing and
Telling Jokes in Victorian Britain.’ For while, as Nicholson argues,
from the 1840s onwards, ‘columns of jokes, jests, puns, witticisms,
and humorous anecdotes [are] a staple feature of the press’, an impor-
tant new cultural figure begins to emerge from the 1850s and 1860s
onwards: that of the professional and semi-professional joke-writer. Yet
for these ‘droll dogs’ and ‘agreeable rattlers’ (just some of the many
‘appellations’, as Nicholson observes, that are applied to this new, and in
some ways, hyper-modern profession) the joke-writer’s art, unlike that of
the professional novelist or journalist, is often anonymised and effaced,
in the process of telling and retelling jests across numerous cultural plat-
forms. As Nicholson notes:

It is easy to imagine the novelist seated at a desk, quill in hand, engaged in

the solitary production of a new manuscript […] Indeed, representations
of this creative ‘brain work’ circulated very widely in Victorian culture
[…] Even [at a lower level of production] the most disreputable kind of
reporting was understood to have been deliberately written by somebody
[… ] Professional joke-writers [however] were less fortunate.
14 L. LEE

For, as Nicholson asserts, the status of joke-work as a form of artistic

production was also hampered by two contradictory impulses: the first
of these was premised on the historical precariousness of the form itself,
that ‘jokes were supposed to be observed, recorded, revived, or caught;
they were not meant to be written’. But then, against this, there was the
extraordinary valency, even promiscuity, of a joke once committed to the
air or to the page:

[A joke] might be retold around dinner tables in return for a plate of

venison, shared with a friend while strolling an art gallery, performed at a
family concert, written on a postcard and submitted to a joke competition,
or printed in newspapers from London to New York. At various stages of
its life, it might be attributed to different wits, but the connection between
a joke and its author was easily invented and even more easily severed.

Nonetheless, the comparative invisibility, even the spectral place of the

joke-writer as a figure of cultural production in the latter half of the cen-
tury, should not be mistaken for marginalisation. For while many jokes
in the period were customised, as Nicholson explains, from old ones, and
others were taken from the sayings of wits or the well-known, increasingly,
many more were taken from the speech of real life, and this gives Victorian
joke-writing and joke-writers, a distinctive character. To demonstrate this,
Nicholson charts the origins and trajectory of some notable jokes from the
1880s and 1890s—drawn, as above, from quotidian observation—including
one based on the overheard expostulation of a visiting Glaswegian to
London, indignantly complaining about extortionate costs in the capital:
‘Bang went saxpence!’ After its first overhearing in the galleries of the Royal
Water Colour Society, this was later reprinted as one of Punch’s most suc-
cessful cartoons, with the phrase entering the language, and, as Nicholson
observes, still in use a century later.38 As he comments:

Jokes, in this observational model of authorship, were not deliberately

written or manufactured, but accidentally encountered, captured and
adapted. There are echoes here of Baudelaire’s flâneur; of would-be jokers
strolling casually through life, subjecting the environment and the unsus-
pecting people around them to a hidden, humour-seeking gaze.

As Nicholson rightly points out, the flâneur’s spectacularised position

as observer, immersed in bohemian and classed masculine culture, is
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 15

implicated in the birth of the ‘saxpence’ joke, for there is a strong sense
that the Glaswegian, himself, did not realise he was being funny—even if
the wits of Punch did.
But there is an extent, here, to which the vocabulary of the period
could be broadened to name this new cultural figure, either as a jokist
(a term used by contemporary newspapers and journals), or as a jokeur,
the latter, drawing on the cultural repertoire of Baudelaire and Walter
Benjamin’s entitled boulevardier—but also, departing from it.39 For, by
dint of the joke-writer’s invisibility and ubiquity, entry into this particu-
lar Victorian club does not rely on the explicit privileges of class or gen-
der, but merely on an eye—or, as more often is the case, an ear—for
the quirky, the amusing, and the overheard incongruous phrase. Punch’s
ledgers show, as Nicholson notes, that hundreds of female contribu-
tors submitted jokes to its annals in this mode (belying the prevailing
Victorian notion that women had no sense of humour), while up and
down the country, journals, and magazines, as well as national and local
newspapers, openly invited readers to offer up similar jokes or pithy say-
ings as part of competitions, or else, public appeals to collate and col-
lect jokes to ‘preserve’ the culture of a particular newspaper’s circulation
area. In the national jokescape of mid-to-late century Victorian Britain,
joke-writing was not only a new profession, but an attitude of mind—
and increasingly, this was a populist, rather than an elitist, pursuit.
It would be difficult, perhaps, to think of an author in the nineteenth
century less apparently associated with the joke than George Eliot. As
Dames has shown, if there is a tempo (what he calls ‘affective mechan-
ics’)40 connected to her work, it is one of duration and elongation,
suggestive, as he asserts, of her seriousness; and indeed, seriousness,
in its many guises, is the way that the Victorians, and Victorian read-
ers, are characterised by Franco Moretti in his important recent work,
The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature.41 But, in my own essay,
‘George Eliot’s Jokes’, I take up her forgotten 1856 article on laugh-
ter, ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ to argue that attention paid to Eliot’s
undoubted interest in wit and humour (both, changing and dynamic
categories in the period) grants us new ways to think about the terms
of realism and sympathy in her work, and the relation between author,
narrators and readers. As I discuss, the essay on the German Romantic
writer Heine, penned anonymously for the Westminster Review, is
one of several that she wrote on this extraordinarily iconoclastic
16 L. LEE

and controversial figure—a cultural exile admired by among others,

Nietzsche—and yet it has received no more than a name-check in two
major critical companions to Eliot’s work in the past twenty years.42 This
is despite the fact that Heine is the author who also provides the literary
mainstay of Freud’s work on the joke. Attending to Eliot’s two-step the-
ory of wit and humour, with humour coming from the heart of culture,
and wit, or the joke (the German word ‘witz’ translates both as ‘wit’ and
‘joke’) striking ‘violently’ in Eliot’s account, like an ‘electric shock’—and
often, before ‘moral sympathies’ are engaged—proffers new ways of read-
ing her novels.43
In a broader sense, though, what is intriguing about Eliot’s work is
the degree to which even such an apparently ‘eminent’ Victorian (to
borrow Lytton Strachey’s satirical term for great nineteenth-century
worthies) is immersed in joke culture.44 One of the earliest recorded
memories of her, as Kathryn Hughes has shown, is of Eliot, as a pre-
cocious seven-year-old in her childhood home at Nuneaton, reciting
verbatim, and to any astonished adult who would listen, jokes from the
eighteenth-century familiar, Joe Miller’s Jest book.45 A similar activity is
also described by the scientific writer Philip Henry Gosse—later a mem-
ber of the strict Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren—who, as a shy
office boy in the 1820s, ‘toilfully copied’ out jokes from Joe Miller’s to
rehearse them in wider company.46 Such childhood transcriptions and
feats of memory provide a tantalising glimpse into subtle, ground-up
shifts in the period: suggesting apocryphal but also meaningful ways in
which the social capital of jokes rendered an experience that was at once
both quasi-literary and quasi-scriptural.
This linkage is also suggested in a heated comparison of a jestbook to
the Bible in the opening chapter of Eliot’s first published novel, Adam
Bede (1859). Even Middlemarch (1871–2), seen by many as the high point
of Eliot’s seriousness, and the summative moment of Victorian r­ealism,
was criticised by a young Henry James, for a tendency to ‘make light
of the serious elements of the story and to sacrifice them to the more triv-
ial ones’.47 ‘Sacrifice’ again stages a conflict, and a decidedly active one,
between religion and comedy in the period. Eliot’s knowledge of the cir-
culatory systems of jokes is also demonstrated in Middlemarch, when the
occasionally feckless, but w ­ ell-meaning, Fred Vincy—whose horse has
gone lame—must suffer the boasts of a horse-trader, not just about his
equine charge’s breathing problems, but about a joke on a similar subject
that went the Victorian equivalent of ‘viral’:
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 17

‘If you set him cantering, he goes on like twenty sawyers. I never heard but
one worse roarer in my life, and that was a roan: it belonged to Pegwell,
the corn-factor; he used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he
wanted me to take him, but I said, “Thank you, Peg, I don’t deal in
wind-instruments.” That was what I said. It went the round of the coun-
try, that joke did.’48

The punchline might be as tired out as the horse, but nonetheless, by the
1870s, going ‘the round of the country’ is, as we have seen, a feasible
trajectory for a joke. What is less so, however, is that Eliot, herself, is,
at one point, constructed as part of the new and ever-expanding invis-
ible army of jokeurs. In a review of her historical Italian novel, Romola
(1862), which contains, incidentally, a chapter entitled ‘A Florentine
Joke’, one critic wrote in Home and Foreign Review in 1863:

[Eliot’s] wit is not of that refined malin, and careless kind which befits
the drawing-room. It is more the wit of the wine-party or club, or the
professed joker whose facetiousness is manufactured by rule and line. […]
Sometimes she ventures on a pun; she tells us that beans were, in more
than one sense, the political pulse of Florence. One who has so deep a
fund of humour ought not to need reminding of the laborious ineffective-
ness of this kind of wit.49

The jibe about the stale or over-worked gag also reveals the self-reflex-
ive debates about the national sense of humour, that, as Wickberg sug-
gests, were increasingly a part of late-Victorian life.50 Leslie Stephen, for
example, averred in his 1876 essay ‘Humour’ for the Cornhill Magazine:

A fashion has sprung up of late years regarding the sense of humour as one
of the cardinal virtues. It naturally follows that everybody supposes that he
possesses the quality himself, and that his neighbours do not. It is indeed
rarer to meet man, woman, or child who will confess to any deficiency in
humour than to a want of logic. Many people will confess that they are
indolent, superstitious, unjust, fond of money, of good living, or of flat-
tery […] but nobody ever admits that he or she can’t see a joke or take an
argument […] everybody has shrunk like a coward at one time or another
from the awful imputation—‘You have no sense of humour’.51

Surprisingly often, what mobilised an indignant critic or letter-writer in

the period was a hackneyed or oft-heard punchline: for the Victorians,
18 L. LEE

as for generations since, jokes required a perpetual sense of topical

up-to-dateness. And it is caught on the horns of this temporal dilemma
that Ann Featherstone depicts the circus clown in ‘The Game of Words:
A Victorian Clown’s Gag-Book and Circus Performance’. For, as she
describes, one of the changing aspects of the clown in the latter half of
the century, is that, rather than being centre stage, he was the continu-
ity man—given the job of ‘keeping the ball rolling’—when many circus
tricks (often involving complex equestrian feats and high-stakes acrobat-
ics) didn’t quite go to plan. In these interim moments, clowns fell back
on ‘wheezes’—prepared routines or asides, ‘parodies of melodrama or
Shakespeare, stump speeches on topics close to an audience’s heart [and
…] re-workings of familiar songs, short gags and backchat, all […] deliv-
ered within the close confines of the circus ring’.
But, as Featherstone notes, clowns—figures both of nostalgia to
Victorian audiences and also more utilitarian comic every men—were
expected to, as one disgruntled red-nosed artiste put it, ‘vault, ride in
saddle, hold balloons and banners, ride comic ponies, act combats and
play parts in pieces [and] practise every day[…]’. Yet they were the focus
of regular complaints (like the one about Eliot) from critical spectators
who tired of the ‘“stale, flat and unprofitable” quality’ of their verbal
repertoire. As one letter to The Era protested in 1883:

Why are the same old wearisome jokes and time belaboured jests repeated
year after year? […] If [clowns] have not the ability themselves can they
not get someone to write them something original? Or, barring this, why
don’t they read the comic and American papers?52

The exigencies of multiple performances meant time spent topping-up

scripts was limited, but what Featherstone explores in her essay—as
do the final two contributions to this section by Louise Wingrove and
Oliver Double—is what Wingrove calls the ‘non-verbal and paralinguis-
tic techniques’ deployed by performers to mediate jokes, as part of the
‘communal circuitry’ between audiences and comedians, often involv-
ing Deleuzian flights of the self.53 Drawing on previously un-discussed
and unpublished notes from the well-thumbed working (rather than
complete) copy of the Victorian clown Thomas Lawrence’s joke-book,
Featherstone describes how this negotiation often meant rising above the
material, to, as one wily circus ringmaster put it—‘just gag it’—meaning
that ‘by a little physical exertion an immense deal of fun may be made
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 19

out of nothing’.54 Nothing is always something in comedy, though,

and, as Featherstone explains, ‘gagging’ is a term which ‘often meant
ad-libbing’ but also more often, an ‘energetic performance, verbally and
physically, using the circus ring and the clown’s proximity to the audi-
ence’. Exploring the many ways, as Featherstone does, in which clowns
breached, but also creatively utilised, this liminal space explains how they
maintained their appeal—despite the sometimes forced quality of their
wheezes, examples of which are rendered below:

The height of nonsense is kissing an old Woman when there’s a young one
close by.
Don’t I look like a descendent of the seasons—my father was a
season—he was a bumbailiff, he often used to seize.
Why are the ladies the biggest thieves in the world—they crib their
babies, they bone their stays and they steel their petticoats.55

As Featherstone notes, these lines ‘sit awkwardly on the page and

only really come alive in the delivery’, but they nonetheless capture
moments where ‘verbose conceit and the self-conscious pun, so pop-
ular in Victorian print, might be realised with “side”’ in the Victorian
circus ring. What is inherent in the jests above, of course, is a kind of
tamely commodified and family-friendly Victorian misogyny, yet gen-
dered dynamics take a different turn in Louise Wingrove’s essay, ‘“Sassin’
Back”: Victorian Serio-Comediennes and Their Audiences’. For, like
Featherstone, Wingrove is as interested in the mode of jokes’ delivery,
and their aftershock, as their verbal content—in the complex interplay
between audience and performer.
And while Freud depicted wit as an almost exclusively male activity in The
Joke And Its Relation to the Unconscious, particularly in the retort (as in, for
example, the famous ‘famillionairely’ opening joke quoted from the pages of
Heine), Wingrove’s essay proffers an alternative account of gendered situa-
tional mastery.56 While, as she notes, few verbatim details exist of the repar-
tee deployed by working-class comediennes like Bessie Bellwood and Jenny
Hill to control and manage hecklers in their audiences, there are descrip-
tions of the spectacularised effects of these encounters. One of Wingrove’s
foci is the ‘punitive patter’ deployed by both women, a weaponised version
of the licensed music hall cross-talk that one northern newspaper reviewer
(in a description of Bellwood) called ‘sassin’ back’.57 To ‘sass’, as Wingrove
observes, has decidedly gendered connotations. It means:
20 L. LEE

[T]o reply or speak to someone impertinently, to answer back, and derives

from the Latin salsus, or salsa—feminine for salted. It connotes vigour and
spirit, but also provocation and conceit, all energies that were welcome in
the music hall […]. Here, sass also connotes an indomitable, specifically
female spirit, talking back, fighting back, and raising her voice, and in this
sense the off-the-cuff, feisty extemporising that is sass is political.

While it is oft-said that female Victorian music hall stars were transgres-
sive, ‘sassin’ back’ reloads the nature of the insult, and the vituperation
of the cultural act, dramatising what Wingrove calls the ‘demonic apoth-
eosis of the comedienne’, utilising the penetrative animus of the joke, to
differentiate herself, as Wingrove suggests, from the serious ‘Galateas’ of
the acting world, often portrayed via ‘sculptural metaphor[s]’ as ‘beau-
tiful, composed, and immaculate’.58 Comic performers like Bellwood
gave loud, skilful and intricate expression to verbal excess as a form of
both unruly autonomy and appropriation, becoming the fierce meto-
nymic ‘tongue’ of thoughtless patriarchal discourse, surreally replicated
as many tongues, in the famous account by Jerome K. Jerome in 1892,
where Bellwood—as Wingrove discusses—rebarbatively berates an unsus-
pecting coal-heaver who had been leading ‘booing and hissing’ against
her. In just under six minutes, and through a virtuoso performance that
transformed the audience’s hostility into standing ovation, she left the
‘forlorn’ heckler eerily and spectrally bereft—by Jerome’s account, ‘sur-
rounded by space, and language’.59
One of the English etymologies of ‘joke’ is from the Old High
German word ‘gehan’—‘to utter’—and such moments reveal the sin-
gular logic of the Victorian music hall’s dream-space, in which stars like
Bellwood, as much audience-created as self-created, deploy their own,
but also a communal comic utterance, as both insiders and outsiders to
the theatres in which they operate.60 In many ways, the negotiations
of a serio-comedienne like Bellwood talks to the ‘jubilant alterity’ of
another performer and household name of the period, Harry Relph,
or ‘Little Tich’.61 As Oliver Double demonstrates in his essay,
‘“Deliberately Shaped for Fun by the High Gods”: Little Tich, Size and
Respectability in the Music Hall’, the verbal gag becomes the ‘sight gag’
in Tich’s works.62 At four foot six inches high, Little Tich (whose name
lives on in the language today) was famed for both his Big Boot Dance
and for acting alongside Britain’s tallest actor, Picton Roxborough (who
was six foot five). The outpourings of popular affection for Little Tich
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 21

were prodigious, literalising, at one point, the phrase ‘hard act to follow’,
when, as Double discusses, an adoring Manchester audience refused to
allow him to leave the stage in preparation for the next act. But Relph’s
success is testament to a kind of comic self-spectacularisation, where he
appears to join in—and enjoy the jokes about his size—while also simul-
taneously and notably distancing himself from them, deploying a gestural
and verbal meta-language admired by among others, J. B. Priestley:

His act, for all its mad energy, kept moving into another and cool dimen-
sion, where we observed and estimated it with him. The clever eyes would
give us a wink or at least a twinkle, asking us to join him as a sophisticated
performer, pretending for our amusement to be an indignant jockey or
outraged lady in court dress. He would suddenly take us behind the scenes
with him, doing it with a single remark. He would offer us a joke and then
confide that it went better the night before.63

Such techniques are redolent of fourth wall-breaking t­ wenty-first-century

comedians like Stewart Lee but, as Double also discusses, the
self-ironising exuberance disguises what, offstage, was a ­
­ decidedly
strained ambivalence about what Lillian Craton has called ‘the Victorian
fascination with physical difference’.64 Choosing Paris rather than
London as a home, Relph, beyond his stage persona, was a gifted
painter, musician and speaker of many languages, who, as Double
observes, counted among his friends artists like Paul Nash and Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec. Indeed, as Nash commented, Relph’s ‘private charac-
ter […] was rather grave and inclined to studiousness’.65 This is borne
out in an extant film of Little Tich doing his Big Boot Dance during the
Paris Exposition of 1900, viewable on YouTube.66 For alongside the ath-
letic skill, the creative ‘angularity’ that would also be a feature of Charlie
Chaplin’s works, and Priestley’s ‘wink, or at least a twinkle’, there is also
an intriguing sang froid.67 One contemporary critic observed, as Double
notes, that Tich’s performance had ‘a spontaneity—or a splendid imita-
tion of it—that is irresistible’.68 This doubleness is perhaps what made
him so beguiling to late nineteenth-century audiences—embodying what
Tom Paulus and Rob King call the ‘paradoxes of the modern subject’.69
In this respect, Little Tich’s boots are themselves something of a tem-
poral conundrum: for they are neither wellington nor hobnail boots,
but long thin shoes—of about two foot—which bear far more resem-
blance to the old wooden slapstick than boots, making the distinctive
22 L. LEE

slapstick report when they hit the stage floor. It is fitting, perhaps, in
the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that the
phantom ‘violence’ of Grimaldi’s slapstick should be replaced with the
phantom ‘fun’ of Little Tich—imbricated in a joke which he may (or
may not) enjoy.

3  Dissent
If the Victorian age began with laughter as a form of resistance, it
ends with a resistance to laughter, or particular iterations of it. The
final three essays in the collection consider the different ways in which
late-Victorian intellectuals, authors and critics dispossess and re-pos-
­
sess comic modes as part of new debates about literary style, aesthetics
and subjectivity. Dickens operates here either as a nostalgic totem of a
bygone age, or as the prototype for a commodified popular collective
whose cultural logic can still be seen in the apparently giddy cohesion
of the music halls. And this is the starting point for Peter Jones’s essay,
‘Laughing Out of Turn: Fin de Siècle Literary Realism and the Vernacular
Humours of the Music Hall’. As he observes:

As the geniality and ‘charmisma’ associated with the Dickensian or

Thackerean corpus faded away, the disenchanted stance of naturalism
became entrenched. Laughter gained little purchase with the socially
conscious narratives of George Gissing, Emile Zola, Arthur Morrison or
Thomas Hardy, which sought to illuminate the enervating effects of mod-
ern conditions on the individual and the masses.70

But such positions are liable to be self-defeating, as Jones argues, for

there is a ‘tonal’ crisis inherent in the genre: the problem is that a com-
mitment to the faithful mimetic representation of modern life meant
also being attentive to ‘forms of merriment in pubs, streets or dwell-
ings’, which seemed ‘glaringly dissonant’ within these works. In this
respect, Jones’s particular focus is the ways in which the ‘gestures and
routines’ of the music hall are subsumed into the ‘pessimistic creed’
of late nineteenth-century realism. This conflict can be seen in a num-
ber of Gissing’s works, including a short story, published in the English
Illustrated Magazine in 1893, ‘The Muse of the Halls’. It concerns the
ambitions of a ‘serious’ composer who marries a former music hall star,
Lillian Dove. Lillian, whose real name is Hilda, speaks in the patter of
the halls, even in private domestic spaces:
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 23

‘The corruption of the music-hall, already! I can’t help it. If I degrade

myself, I am only following the general example of our time. Everybody,
in every kind of art, is beginning to play to the gallery. We have to be dem-
ocratic, or starve. And we don’t like starving. We’ve got to climb down—
there’s a phrase for you, Denis! We have to get a show—there’s another!
We must find tunes that’ll knock ’em’—71

Yet while Hilda’s husband Denis attempts to retain something like

artistic autonomy, this proves a fruitless quest that ends in a form of aes-
thetic capitulation (or ‘playing to the gallery’) as he abandons his attempt
at writing a ‘Cantata’ and instead becomes the pseudonymous writer of
catchy music hall ditties, famed through the land.72 John Carey has com-
mented that Gissing was one of the earliest English writers to ‘formu-
late the intellectuals’ case against mass culture’—an argument, that he
suggests, was done ‘so thoroughly that nothing essential has been added
[…] since’.73 What is striking about Gissing, though—as for other writ-
ers of the ‘novel of misery’—is that it is not only laughter’s connection
with populism that made it a suspicious activity, but laughter itself: for
it signified a fundamental misreading of life. In this respect, the work
of Gissing and others was seen as an aesthetic riposte to the ‘humane
Idealism of Victor Hugo and […] Dickens’, who ‘lacked the central con-
viction that the life of man was a nightmare of sensuality, crime, drunk-
enness and nervous disorders’.74 Nonetheless, it is perhaps a capitulation
of the kind that Gissing himself fictionalised, that despite his own com-
mitment, as Jones observes, to a ‘mordant solemnity’, he also, at one
point, ‘played to the gallery’, and enjoyed commercial success by writing
a novel that was a ‘knowing parody of the Dickensian comic method’,
The Town Traveller. This became an unexpected hit, universally praised.75
It is a different sort of protest to laughter—but nonetheless an impas-
sioned one—that is taken up in Jonathan Wild’s essay, ‘What Was New
About the “New Humour”?: Barry Pain’s “Divine Carelessness”.’ Faced
with reading the work of the 1890s writer Pain, whose humour, as Wild
observes, is a surreal forerunner of Monty Python, the critic Andrew
Lang complained: ‘These new jokes vanquish me; they make me feel
more than commonly suicidal. Anyone can put together incongruous
bosh’. In an essay for Longman’s Magazine, in 1891, and responding to
a favourable Punch review of Pain’s first book, In a Canadian Canoe,
Lang commented that, ‘it seems pretty certain that the same mind can-
not appreciate both the New Humour and the old’.76 Yet, as Wild notes,
24 L. LEE

it is odd—considering Pain inspired the ‘pejorative’ category of New

Humour—that his work is not more representative of other notable and
enduring writers of this school like Jerome K. Jerome. Wild’s discussion
focuses on the aspect of Pain’s work that so exasperated Lang, particu-
larly the serio-comic device of the apologue, or moral fable, which ren-
dered what Pain called the ‘spirit of divine carelessness’ that he argued
was essential to all humour:

If there is one gift more than another which opens to a man the world of
the imagination, that gift is humour. Here that divine carelessness which is
essential to true humour can move unimpeded: there are no stupid limita-
tions; one needs no paltry research to acquire the local colour; one need
not consult the lawyer, the doctor, nor the antiquarian, in order to gain
a mean and stupid accuracy. The world of the imagination has no laws
and no limitations but those which the instinct of the artist imposes upon
him. It is not easy, as it may seem to some, to acquit one’s self well in that
world; it is not true that anyone can write a story of the imaginary world.
There is a distinction between carelessness, the habit of merely making
mistakes, and that divine carelessness which belongs to true humour.77

Pain’s philosophical interests in humour are echoes of the work of e­ arlier

Romantic comedic metaphysicians like Jean Paul Richter, but are also
inflected with a strong dose of everyday detail and anthropomorphism.
Particularly characteristic of the stories from In a Canadian Canoe are
‘On Art and Sardines’ which features a ‘doe sardine’, swimming beneath
a rowing boat moored by the Cambridge Backs, reading a novel by
Ouida thrown overboard in disgust by a young man on a steamer.78
Another apologue, ‘The Girl and the Beetle’, features a dying beetle
called Thomas, who has lived a life of ‘immorality’ and is encouraged by
his beetle wife Mary, and a pious acquaintance, Dear Friend (also a bee-
tle) to repent his life, but, at one point, this process of spiritual purifica-
tion is interrupted by ‘a curious stridulating noise’ which Thomas makes,
and which he explains thus79:

‘It is caused,’ he answered dryly, ‘by the friction of a transversely striated

elevation on the posterior border of the hinder coxa against the hinder
margin of the acctabulum, into which it fits.’
‘Ah!’ gasped the Dear Friend; but he speedily recovered himself.
‘That is indeed interesting— really, extremely interesting.’ He was try-
ing to think in what way it would be possible to connect this with more
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 25

important matters. ‘Talking about fits,’ he said, ‘I have just come away
from such a sad case, quite a young-’
‘I was not talking about fits, sir,’ interrupted Thomas, a little irritably.80

As Wild notes, this story becomes a satire of Victorian attitudes to

death, but the apologue offered, a ‘format capable of providing fresh
impetus for literature, being “much less exhausted than the lump of stir-
ring incidents which is welcomed as a novel of adventure”’.81 A story in
similar mode is ‘The Celestial Grocery’, which focuses on a shop that
deals in abstract concepts rather than material goods—for example,
‘Requited Love’, ‘Political Success’, and ‘Personal Charm’—and culmi-
nates, as Wild suggests, with ‘a pathetically sombre conclusion’. Despite
enthusiastic reviews elsewhere, Lang regarded Pain’s humour as, at best,
undergraduate tomfoolery (‘Cambridge fun’), or, at worst, the result of
what Wild calls a ‘deeply corrupted sensibility’, or an unhealthy ‘deca-
dent variety’ of humour that Lang distinguished from an earlier ‘healthy
nonsense’ such as that exemplified by the work of Edward Lear.
The discourse of what constituted healthy humour—or not—in
the 1890s is taken up more explicitly in the final essay of the col-
lection, Matthew Kaiser’s ‘Just Laughter: Neurodiversity in Oscar
Wilde’s “Pen, Pencil and Poison”.’ Here, the focus is on a work which
is often regarded as relatively minor in the Wildean canon, but which
Kaiser argues is ‘theoretically innovative’, and deserves reassessment
for its anticipation of debates ‘for which we only now are developing
a vocabulary’. It concerns the life of the Regency dandy, forger, critic
and notorious poisoner—Thomas Griffiths Wainewright—who ‘mur-
dered two women and two men and attempted to kill two Australians’.
Kaiser’s interest is in the affective dissonance caused by the ­undoubtedly
grim (and reputedly real-life) subject matter of Wainewright’s dastard-
liness, and its witty and mercurial treatment by Wilde. This includes,
at one point, Wainewright’s justification for murdering his sister-in-
law—‘the lovely’ Helen Abercrombie—whose ‘life he had insured for
18,000l’. As Wilde notes, ‘when a friend reproached [Wainewright]
with [her] murder, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yes; it
was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.”’82 Such
moments, as Kaiser observes, unsettle all sense of what a morally or
‘mentally fit’ reader might be.
26 L. LEE

Yet repeatedly, as Kaiser argues, twenty-first-century critics and read-

ers of ‘Pen, Pencil & Poison’ have displaced their focus away from
the essay’s ethical complexity to more palatable concerns such as for-
gery, Paterian aesthetics, or rhetoric—anything, in other words, to take
the sting out of the tale. But to acknowledge, indeed to reclaim, these
unpleasant aspects, grants new revelations about the nature of laughter,
and about reading itself at the end of the century:

We must be prepared as readers to poison our minds, to read against the

grain of our cognitive health. Forget, for a moment, the ‘remarkable’
Wainewright, or the witty Wilde: the reader is the true hero, or anti-hero,
in ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’. The subject of Wilde’s essay is our laughter:
our susceptibility or resistance to his cruel jokes. Wilde prods us into ques-
tioning our ideological—our neuronormative—investment in being per-
ceived by our peers as intellectually ‘healthy’ readers.

These are debates, he asserts, which strike at the very heart of English
literary studies, both as an emergent discipline in the Victorian period—
which ‘justified [its] enterprise ideologically on therapeutic grounds’—
and also one that speaks today through a differentiated language of
neuroscientific investigation, and ‘the nascent neurodiversity movement’.
Unexpectedly, as Kaiser argues, it is one of Wilde’s most vociferous, and
conservative critics, who got closest to understanding, as Wilde did, the
‘neural plasticity’ inherent in reading. Though Max Nordau—author of
Degeneration (1892)—was sent into a ‘wordless rage’ about ‘Pen, Pencil
and Poison’, nonetheless, ‘uncanny similarities’ exist between Wilde and
Nordau in regard to their views on the ‘reader as physically susceptible to
literary texts’.
The difference, suggests Kaiser, is one of degree rather than kind:
while Nordau assumes one ‘neurotypical reader’—a divergence from
which is bound up with accusations of deviance and deficits—Wilde
assumes many readers and ‘actively encourages his readers to be of two
minds, indeed, to be of four minds[…]’. As Kaiser suggests:

‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ addresses itself simultaneously to at least four

implied or mock readers: a socially conscious reader fascinated but trou-
bled by the idea of Wainewright; a dispassionate and clinically detached
reader who views Wainewright as a metaphor or conceptual abstraction
rather than as an actual person; a sociopathic reader who smiles indulgently
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 27

at Wainewright’s unconventional and unsentimental attitude; and an aes-

thetically sensitive reader engrossed in the play of Wilde’s language, in the
illusion produced. All four of these implied readers think the joke is on the
other three readers. All four are correct. In ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’, Wilde
encourages us to laugh behind our own multiple backs.

Notes
1. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin,
2003), 128.
2. Alfie Bown, In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and
Comedy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 2. See also Alain Badiou, Being
and Event (London: Continuum, 2005).
3. Anca Parvulescu, Laughter: Notes on a Passion (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2010), 14.
4. James Kincaid, ‘Laughter and “Oliver Twist”,’ PMLA 83, no. 1 (March
1968): 63.
5. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 186–187.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes
and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 104.
7. Sara Crangle, Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter,
and Anticipation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 112.
8. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 15–50.
9. R. B. Martin, The Triumph of Wit: A Study of Victorian Comic Theory
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 82.
10. Nicholas Dames, ‘On Not Close Reading: The Prolonged Excerpt
as Victorian Critical Protocol,’ in The Feeling of Reading: Affective
Experience and Victorian Literature, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor, MI:
The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 12–15.
11. Rachel Ablow, ‘Introduction: The Feeling of Reading,’ in The Feeling of
Reading, 5.
12. Parvulescu, Laughter, 7. Also the subject of a commemorative conference
keynote speech given by Sir Kenneth Calman, ‘An Examination of Wit:
Erasmus Darwin’s Unwritten Book’, in Lichfield, April 19–22, 2002.
13. See Richard D. Altick, Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution,
1841–1851 (Athens: Ohio State University Press, 1997), 13–15.
14. Ibid., 19.
15. D. M. Hassler, The Comedian as the Letter D: Erasmus Darwin’s Comic
Materialism (New York: Springer, 2012), 22, n. 50.
28 L. LEE

16. William Hazlitt, ‘On Wit and Humour,’ in Lectures on the English Comic
Writers (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), 29.
17. Walter Pater, ‘Charles Lamb,’ in Appreciations: With an Essay on Style
(London: Macmillan & Co., 1889), 107.
18. Parvulescu, Laughter 19–20.
19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, &
Co., 1886), 256.
20. Robert Pfaller, ed. Stop that Comedy! On the Subtle Hegemony of the Tragic
in Our Culture (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2005).
21. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2013), 63.
22. Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
Editions, 1993), 74.
23. Dickens, Pickwick Papers, 73–74.
24. Thomas Carlyle, ‘John Paul Friedrich Richter,’ in Critical and
Miscellaneous Essays Collected and Republished (New York: Alden, 1885),
19–20.
25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 25.
26. Mamie Dickens, My Father As I Recall Him (Westminster: Roxburghe
Press, 1897), 31.
27. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1975), 66.
28. John Bowen, Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 44–82.
29. Malcolm Andrews, Dickensian Laughter (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 43.
30. Charles Dickens, ‘Letter to Mary Tayler,’ 6 November 1849, in The Letters
of Charles Dickens: 1847–1849, ed. Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 640.
31. Ibid., 640.
32. Jeffrey Richards, The Golden Age of Pantomime: Slapstick, Spectacle and
Subversion in Victorian England (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014) is a magnif-
icent starting point for reading into the cultural significance of Victorian
slapstick; as is Maggie Hennefeld’s consideration of the post-Victorian
moment in Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2018).
33. Charles Dickens, ed. The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, 2 vols. (London:
Richard Bentley, 1838), xi.
34. Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Queerer and Queerer: “Edward Lear: The Complete
Verse and Other Nonsense”,’ The Guardian, November 11, 2001,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/nov/11/classics.
highereducation.
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 29

35. Henry James, The Tragic Muse (London: Macmillan and Co., 1921), xi.
36. Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce
Crick (London: Penguin, 2003), 9.
37. Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern
America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 122.
38. For the joke as Victorian commodity, see also Wickberg, The Senses of
Humor, chapter four.
39. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 4, 1938–40, ed. Howard Eiland
and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2003), 18–35.
40. Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and
the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 56.
41. Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London:
Verso Books, 2013), 74.
42. See chapter six: 175, n.24.
43. George Eliot, ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine,’ Westminster Review 65
(January 1856): 3.
44. Lytton Strachey, Cornerstones: Portraits of Four Eminent Victorians
(Tucson, AZ: Fireship Press, 2009). Eliot, however, wasn’t included in
Strachey’s list.
45. Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 19.
46. Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the
Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011), 36. See also, Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of
Philip Henry Gosse (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 34–35.
47. Henry James, unsigned review, Galaxy 15 (March 1873): 424–428.
48. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994),
197.
49. Richard Simpson, ‘Richard Simpson on George Eliot,’ in George Eliot: The
Critical Heritage, ed. David Carroll (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge,
2013), 233.
50. The Senses of Humor, 123–134.
51. Leslie Stephen, ‘Humour,’ Cornhill Magazine 33 (March 1876):
318–326.
52. The Era, August 4, 1883.
53. Barry J. Faulk, Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of
Popular Culture (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), 30.
54. Peter Paterson, Glimpses of Real Life, As Seen in the Theatrical World and
in Bohemia: Being the Confessions of Peter Paterson (Edinburgh: William P.
Nimmo, 1864), 115.
30 L. LEE

55. For details about transcribing Lawrence’s notes, see Ann Featherstone’s

essay for this volume: 203, n.8.
56. Freud, The Joke, 11.
57. ‘Chips,’ The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, January 22, 1894, 4.
58. Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and
the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
59. Jerome K. Jerome, ‘Variety Patter,’ The Idler 1, no. 2 (March 1892): 123–
135. See also Peter Jones’s discussion of the scene in his essay for this
edition.
60. Donald Phillip Verene, The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies (Eugene,
OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 60.
61. Tom Paulus and Rob King, ‘Introduction,’ in Slapstick Comedy, ed. Tom
Paulus and Rob King (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2010), 5.
62. See Nöel Carroll’s discussion of the sight gag in Comedy/Cinema/Theory
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991).
63. J. B. Priestley, Particular Pleasures (London: Heinemann, 1975), 189.
64. Lillian Craton, The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability
and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction (Amherst, NY: Cambria
Press, 2009), 2.
65. Paul Nash, Outline: An Autobiography (London: Columbus Books,
1988), 170.
66. See chapter nine: 258, n.63.
67. Alan Burton and Laraine Porter, Crossing the Pond: Anglo-American Film
Relations Before 1930 (Towbridge: Flicks Books, 2002), 98.
68. ‘Variety Theatres,’ Manchester Guardian, December 16, 1908, 14.
69. Paulus and King, 15.
70. William Oddie, ‘Mr. Micawber and the Redefinition of Experience,’
in Charles Dickens, ed. Harold Bloom, rev. edn (New York: Infobase
Publishing, 2006), 98.
71. George Gissing, ‘The Muse of the Halls,’ The Gissing Journal 42, no. 3
(2006): 8.
72. Ibid., 10.
73. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among
the Literary Intelligentsia (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 93.
74. ‘The Novel of Misery,’ Quarterly Review 196, no. 392 (October 1902):
391–414.
75. Simon J. James, Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of
George Gissing (London: Anthem Press, 2003), 52, 98.
76. Andrew Lang, ‘At the Sign of the Ship: The New Humour,’ Longman’s
Magazine 18, no. 108 (October 1891): 660–662.
77. Barry Pain, ‘The Old Humour and the New,’ The Speaker 4 (December
19, 1891): 741.
 INTRODUCTION: VICTORIAN COMEDY AND LAUGHTER … 31

78. Barry Pain, In a Canadian Canoe (London: Henry & Co., 1891), 5–6.
79. Ibid., 168.
80. Ibid., 168–169.
81. Pain, ‘The Old Humour and the New,’ 741.
82. Oscar Wilde, Intentions, in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar
Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969), 377.

Works Cited
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Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, edited by Rachel
Ablow, 1–10. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Altick, Richard, D. Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution, 1841–1851.
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infinies; ces projets de suicide causés par un mot et dissipés par une
intonation de voix aussi étendue que le sentiment dont elle révèle la
persistance méconnue; ces regards tremblants qui voilent de
terribles hardiesses; ces envies soudaines de parler et d’agir,
réprimées par leur violence même; cette éloquence intime qui se
produit par des phrases sans esprit, mais prononcées d’une voix
agitée; les mystérieux effets de cette primitive pudeur de l’âme et de
cette divine discrétion qui rend généreux dans l’ombre, et fait trouver
un goût exquis aux dévouements ignorés; enfin, toutes les beautés
de l’amour jeune et les faiblesses de sa puissance.
Mademoiselle Joséphine de Temninck fut coquette par grandeur
d’âme. Le sentiment de ses apparentes imperfections la rendit aussi
difficile que l’eût été la plus belle personne. La crainte de déplaire un
jour éveillait sa fierté, détruisait sa confiance et lui donnait le courage
de garder au fond de son cœur ces premières félicités que les autres
femmes aiment à publier par leurs manières, et dont elles se font
une orgueilleuse parure. Plus l’amour la poussait vivement vers
Balthazar, moins elle osait lui exprimer ses sentiments. Le geste, le
regard, la réponse ou la demande qui, chez une jolie femme, sont
des flatteries pour un homme, ne devenaient-elles pas en elle
d’humiliantes spéculations? Une femme belle peut à son aise être
elle-même, le monde lui fait toujours crédit d’une sottise ou d’une
gaucherie; tandis qu’un seul regard arrête l’expression la plus
magnifique sur les lèvres d’une femme laide, intimide ses yeux,
augmente la mauvaise grâce de ses gestes, embarrasse son
maintien. Ne sait-elle pas qu’à elle seule il est défendu de commettre
des fautes, chacun lui refuse le don de les réparer, et d’ailleurs
personne ne lui en fournit l’occasion. La nécessité d’être à chaque
instant parfaite ne doit-elle pas éteindre les facultés, glacer leur
exercice? Cette femme ne peut vivre que dans une atmosphère
d’angélique indulgence. Où sont les cœurs d’où l’indulgence
s’épanche sans se teindre d’une amère et blessante pitié? Ces
pensées auxquelles l’avait accoutumée l’horrible politesse du
monde, et ces égards qui, plus cruels que des injures, aggravent les
malheurs en les constatant, oppressaient mademoiselle de
Temninck, lui causaient une gêne constante qui refoulait au fond de
son âme les impressions les plus délicieuses, et frappait de froideur
son attitude, sa parole, son regard. Elle était amoureuse à la
dérobée, n’osait avoir de l’éloquence ou de la beauté que dans la
solitude. Malheureuse au grand jour, elle aurait été ravissante s’il lui
avait été permis de ne vivre qu’à la nuit. Souvent, pour éprouver cet
amour et au risque de le perdre, elle dédaignait la parure qui pouvait
sauver en partie ses défauts. Ses yeux d’Espagnole fascinaient
quand elle s’apercevait que Balthazar la trouvait belle en négligé.
Néanmoins, la défiance lui gâtait les rares instants pendant lesquels
elle se hasardait à se livrer au bonheur. Elle se demandait bientôt si
Claës ne cherchait pas à l’épouser pour avoir au logis une esclave,
s’il n’avait pas quelques imperfections secrètes qui l’obligeaient à se
contenter d’une pauvre fille disgraciée. Ces anxiétés perpétuelles
donnaient parfois un prix inouï aux heures où elle croyait à la durée,
à la sincérité d’un amour qui devait la venger du monde. Elle
provoquait de délicates discussions en exagérant sa laideur, afin de
pénétrer jusqu’au fond de la conscience de son amant, elle arrachait
alors à Balthazar des vérités peu flatteuses; mais elle aimait
l’embarras où il se trouvait, quand elle l’avait amené à dire que ce
qu’on aimait dans une femme était avant tout une belle âme, et ce
dévouement qui rend les jours de la vie si constamment heureux;
qu’après quelques années de mariage, la plus délicieuse femme de
la terre est pour un mari l’équivalent de la plus laide. Après avoir
entassé ce qu’il y avait de vrai dans les paradoxes qui tendent à
diminuer le prix de la beauté, soudain Balthazar s’apercevait de la
désobligeance de ces propositions, et découvrait toute la bonté de
son cœur dans la délicatesse des transitions par lesquelles il savait
prouver à mademoiselle de Temninck qu’elle était parfaite pour lui.
Le dévouement, qui peut-être est chez la femme le comble de
l’amour, ne manqua pas à cette fille, car elle désespéra d’être
toujours aimée; mais la perspective d’une lutte dans laquelle le
sentiment devait l’emporter sur la beauté la tenta; puis elle trouva de
la grandeur à se donner sans croire à l’amour; enfin le bonheur, de
quelque courte durée qu’il pût être, devait lui coûter trop cher pour
qu’elle se refusât à le goûter. Ces incertitudes, ces combats, en
communiquant le charme et l’imprévu de la passion à cette créature
supérieure, inspiraient à Balthazar un amour presque
chevaleresque.
 Le mariage eut lieu au commencement de l’année 1705. Les
deux époux revinrent à Douai passer les premiers jours de leur
union dans la maison patriarcale des Claës, dont les trésors furent
grossis par mademoiselle de Temninck qui apporta quelques beaux
tableaux de Murillo et de Velasquez, les diamants de sa mère et les
magnifiques présents que lui envoya son frère, devenu duc de Casa-
Réal. Peu de femmes furent plus heureuses que madame Claës.
Son bonheur dura quinze années, sans le plus léger nuage; et
comme une vive lumière, il s’infusa jusque dans les menus détails
de l’existence. La plupart des hommes ont des inégalités de
caractère qui produisent de continuelles dissonances; ils privent
ainsi leur intérieur de cette harmonie, le beau idéal du ménage; car
la plupart des hommes sont entachés de petitesses, et les petitesses
engendrent les tracasseries. L’un sera probe et actif, mais dur et
rêche; l’autre sera bon, mais entêté; celui-ci aimera sa femme, mais
aura de l’incertitude dans ses volontés; celui-là, préoccupé par
l’ambition, s’acquittera de ses sentiments comme d’une dette, s’il
donne les vanités de la fortune, il emporte la joie de tous les jours;
enfin, les hommes du milieu social sont essentiellement incomplets,
sans être notablement reprochables. Les gens d’esprit sont variables
autant que des baromètres, le génie seul est essentiellement bon.
Aussi le bonheur pur se trouve-t-il aux deux extrémités de l’échelle
morale. La bonne bête ou l’homme de génie sont seuls capables,
l’un par faiblesse, l’autre par force, de cette égalité d’humeur, de
cette douceur constante dans laquelle se fondent les aspérités de la
vie. Chez l’un, c’est indifférence et passivité; chez l’autre, c’est
indulgence et continuité de la pensée sublime dont il est l’interprète
et qui doit se ressembler dans le principe comme dans l’application.
L’un et l’autre sont également simples et naïfs; seulement, chez
celui-là c’est le vide; chez celui-ci c’est la profondeur. Aussi les
femmes adroites sont-elles assez disposées à prendre une bête
comme le meilleur pis-aller d’un grand homme. Balthazar porta donc
d’abord sa supériorité dans les plus petites choses de la vie. Il se
plut à voir dans l’amour conjugal une œuvre magnifique, et comme
les hommes de haute portée qui ne souffrent rien d’imparfait, il
voulut en déployer toutes les beautés. Son esprit modifiait
incessamment le calme du bonheur, son noble caractère marquait
ses attentions au coin de la grâce. Ainsi, quoiqu’il partageât les
principes philosophiques du dix-huitième siècle, il installa chez lui
jusqu’en 1801, malgré les dangers que les lois révolutionnaires lui
faisaient courir, un prêtre catholique, afin de ne pas contrarier le
fanatisme espagnol que sa femme avait sucé dans le lait maternel
pour le catholicisme romain; puis, quand le culte fut rétabli en
France, il accompagna sa femme à la messe, tous les dimanches.
Jamais son attachement ne quitta les formes de la passion. Jamais il
ne fit sentir dans son intérieur cette force protectrice que les femmes
aiment tant, parce que pour la sienne elle aurait ressemblé à de la
pitié. Enfin, par la plus ingénieuse adulation, il la traitait comme son
égale et laissait échapper de ces aimables bouderies qu’un homme
se permet envers une belle femme comme pour en braver la
supériorité. Ses lèvres furent toujours embellies par le sourire du
bonheur, et sa parole fut toujours pleine de douceur. Il aima sa
Joséphine pour elle et pour lui, avec cette ardeur qui comporte un
éloge continuel des qualités et des beautés d’une femme. La fidélité,
souvent l’effet d’un principe social, d’une religion ou d’un calcul chez
les maris, en lui, semblait involontaire, et n’allait point sans les
douces flatteries du printemps de l’amour. Le devoir était du mariage
la seule obligation qui fût inconnue à ces deux êtres également
aimants, car Balthazar Claës trouva dans mademoiselle de
Temninck une constante et complète réalisation de ses espérances.
En lui, le cœur fut toujours assouvi sans fatigue, et l’homme toujours
heureux. Non-seulement, le sang espagnol ne mentait pas chez la
petite fille des Casa-Réal, et lui faisait un instinct de cette science
qui sait varier le plaisir à l’infini; mais elle eut aussi ce dévouement
sans bornes qui est le génie de son sexe, comme la grâce en est
toute la beauté. Son amour était un fanatisme aveugle qui sur un
seul signe de tête l’eût fait aller joyeusement à la mort. La
délicatesse de Balthazar avait exalté chez elle les sentiments les
plus généreux de la femme, et lui inspirait un impérieux besoin de
donner plus qu’elle ne recevait. Ce mutuel échange d’un bonheur
alternativement prodigué mettait visiblement le principe de sa vie en
dehors d’elle, et répandait un croissant amour dans ses paroles,
dans ses regards, dans ses actions. De part et d’autre, la
reconnaissance fécondait et variait la vie du cœur; de même que la
certitude d’être tout l’un pour l’autre excluait les petitesses en
agrandissant les moindres accessoires de l’existence. Mais aussi, la
femme contrefaite que son mari trouve droite, la femme boiteuse
qu’un homme ne veut pas autrement, ou la femme âgée qui paraît
jeune, ne sont-elles pas les plus heureuses créatures du monde
féminin?... La passion humaine ne saurait aller au delà. La gloire de
la femme n’est-elle pas de faire adorer ce qui paraît un défaut en
elle. Oublier qu’une boiteuse ne marche pas droit est la fascination
d’un moment; mais l’aimer parce qu’elle boite est la déification de
son vice. Peut-être faudrait-il graver dans l’Évangile des femmes
cette sentence: Bienheureuses les imparfaites, à elles appartient le
royaume de l’amour. Certes, la beauté doit être un malheur pour une
femme, car cette fleur passagère entre pour trop dans le sentiment
qu’elle inspire; ne l’aime-t-on pas comme on épouse une riche
héritière? Mais l’amour que fait éprouver ou que témoigne une
femme déshéritée des fragiles avantages après lesquels courent les
enfants d’Adam, est l’amour vrai, la passion vraiment mystérieuse,
une ardente étreinte des âmes, un sentiment pour lequel le jour du
désenchantement n’arrive jamais. Cette femme a des grâces
ignorées du monde au contrôle duquel elle se soustrait, elle est belle
à propos, et recueille trop de gloire à faire oublier ses imperfections
pour n’y pas constamment réussir. Aussi, les attachements les plus
célèbres dans l’histoire furent-ils presque tous inspirés par des
femmes à qui le vulgaire aurait trouvé des défauts. Cléopâtre,
Jeanne de Naples, Diane de Poitiers, mademoiselle de la Vallière,
madame de Pompadour, enfin la plupart des femmes que l’amour a
rendues célèbres ne manquent ni d’imperfections, ni d’infirmités;
tandis que la plupart des femmes dont la beauté nous est citée
comme parfaite, ont vu finir malheureusement leurs amours. Cette
apparente bizarrerie doit avoir sa cause. Peut-être l’homme vit-il plus
par le sentiment que par le plaisir? peut-être le charme tout physique
d’une belle femme a-t-il des bornes, tandis que le charme
essentiellement moral d’une femme de beauté médiocre est infini?
N’est-ce pas la moralité de la fabulation sur laquelle reposent les
Mille et une Nuits. Femme d’Henri VIII, une laide aurait défié la
hache et soumis l’inconstance du maître. Par une bizarrerie assez
explicable chez une fille d’origine espagnole, madame Claës était
ignorante. Elle savait lire et écrire; mais jusqu’à l’âge de vingt ans,
époque à laquelle ses parents la tirèrent du couvent, elle n’avait lu
que des ouvrages ascétiques. En entrant dans le monde, elle eut
d’abord soif des plaisirs du monde et n’apprit que les sciences futiles
de la toilette; mais elle fut si profondément humiliée de son
ignorance qu’elle n’osait se mêler à aucune conversation; aussi
passa-t-elle pour avoir peu d’esprit. Cependant, cette éducation
mystique avait eu pour résultat de laisser en elle les sentiments dans
toute leur force, et de ne point gâter son esprit naturel. Sotte et laide
comme une héritière aux yeux du monde, elle devint spirituelle et
belle pour son mari. Balthazar essaya bien pendant les premières
années de son mariage de donner à sa femme les connaissances
dont elle avait besoin pour être bien dans le monde; mais il était
sans doute trop tard, elle n’avait que la mémoire du cœur. Joséphine
n’oubliait rien de ce que lui disait Claës, relativement à eux-mêmes;
elle se souvenait des plus petites circonstances de sa vie heureuse,
et ne se rappelait pas le lendemain sa leçon de la veille. Cette
ignorance eût causé de grands discords entre d’autres époux; mais
madame Claës avait une si naïve entente de la passion, elle aimait
si pieusement, si saintement son mari, et le désir de conserver son
bonheur la rendait si adroite qu’elle s’arrangeait toujours pour
paraître le comprendre, et laissait rarement arriver les moments où
son ignorance eût été par trop évidente. D’ailleurs quand deux
personnes s’aiment assez pour que chaque jour soit pour eux le
premier de leur passion, il existe dans ce fécond bonheur des
phénomènes qui changent toutes les conditions de la vie. N’est-ce
pas alors comme une enfance insouciante de tout ce qui n’est pas
rire, joie, plaisir? Puis, quand la vie est bien active, quand les foyers
en sont bien ardents, l’homme laisse aller la combustion sans y
penser ou la discuter, sans mesurer les moyens ni la fin. Jamais
d’ailleurs aucune fille d’Ève n’entendit mieux que madame Claës son
métier de femme. Elle eut cette soumission de la Flamande, qui rend
le foyer domestique si attrayant, et à laquelle sa fierté d’Espagnole
donnait une plus haute saveur. Elle était imposante, savait
commander le respect par un regard où éclatait le sentiment de sa
valeur et de sa noblesse; mais devant Claës elle tremblait; et, à la
longue, elle avait fini par le mettre si haut et si près de Dieu, en lui
rapportant tous les actes de sa vie et ses moindres pensées, que
son amour n’allait plus sans une teinte de crainte respectueuse qui
l’aiguisait encore. Elle prit avec orgueil toutes les habitudes de la
bourgeoisie flamande et plaça son amour-propre à rendre la vie
domestique grassement heureuse, à entretenir les plus petits détails
de la maison dans leur propreté classique, à ne posséder que des
choses d’une bonté absolue, à maintenir sur sa table les mets les
plus délicats et à mettre tout chez elle en harmonie avec la vie du
cœur. Ils eurent deux garçons et deux filles. L’aînée, nommée
Marguerite, était née en 1796. Le dernier enfant était un garçon, âgé
de trois ans et nommé Jean Balthazar. Le sentiment maternel fut
chez madame Claës presque égal à son amour pour son époux.
Aussi se passa-t-il en son âme, et surtout pendant les derniers jours
de sa vie, un combat horrible entre ces deux sentiments également
puissants, et dont l’un était en quelque sorte devenu l’ennemi de
l’autre. Les larmes et la terreur empreintes sur sa figure au moment
où commence le récit du drame domestique qui couvait dans cette
paisible maison, étaient causées par la crainte d’avoir sacrifié ses
enfants à son mari.
En 1805, le frère de madame Claës mourut sans laisser
d’enfants. La loi espagnole s’opposait à ce que la sœur succédât
aux possessions territoriales qui apanageaient les titres de la
maison; mais par ses dispositions testamentaires, le duc lui légua
soixante mille ducats environ, que les héritiers de la branche
collatérale ne lui disputèrent pas. Quoique le sentiment qui l’unissait
à Balthazar Claës fut tel que jamais aucune idée d’intérêt l’eût
entaché, Joséphine éprouva une sorte de contentement à posséder
une fortune égale à celle de son mari, et fut heureuse de pouvoir à
son tour lui offrir quelque chose après avoir si noblement tout reçu
de lui. Le hasard fit donc que ce mariage, dans lequel les
calculateurs voyaient une folie, fût, sous le rapport de l’intérêt, un
excellent mariage. L’emploi de cette somme fut assez difficile à
déterminer. La maison Claës était si richement fournie en meubles,
en tableaux, en objets d’art et de prix, qu’il semblait difficile d’y
ajouter des choses dignes de celles qui s’y trouvaient déjà. Le goût
de cette famille y avait accumulé des trésors. Une génération s’était
mise à la piste de beaux tableaux; puis la nécessité de compléter la
collection commencée avait rendu le goût de la peinture héréditaire.
Les cent tableaux qui ornaient la galerie par laquelle on
communiquait du quartier de derrière aux appartements de réception
situés au premier étage de la maison de devant, ainsi qu’une
cinquantaine d’autres placés dans les salons d’apparat, avaient
exigé trois siècles de patientes recherches. C’était de célèbres
morceaux de Rubens, de Ruysdaël, de Van-Dyck, de Terburg, de
Gérard Dow, de Teniers, de Miéris, de Paul Potter, de Wouwermans,
de Rembrandt, d’Hobbema, de Cranach et d’Holbein. Les tableaux
italiens et français étaient en minorité, mais tous authentiques et
capitaux. Une autre génération avait eu la fantaisie des services de
porcelaine japonaise ou chinoise. Tel Claës s’était passionné pour
les meubles, tel autre pour l’argenterie, enfin chacun d’eux avait eu
sa manie, sa passion, l’un des traits les plus saillants du caractère
flamand. Le père de Balthazar, le dernier débris de la fameuse
société hollandaise, avait laissé l’une des plus riches collections de
tulipes, connues. Outre ces richesses héréditaires qui représentaient
un capital énorme, et meublaient magnifiquement cette vieille
maison, simple au dehors comme une coquille, mais comme une
coquille intérieurement nacrée et parée des plus riches couleurs,
Balthazar Claës possédait encore une maison de campagne dans la
plaine d’Orchies. Loin de baser, comme les Français, sa dépense
sur ses revenus, il avait suivi la vieille coutume hollandaise de n’en
consommer que le quart; et douze cents ducats par an mettaient sa
dépense au niveau de celle que faisaient les plus riches personnes
de la ville. La publication du Code Civil donna raison à cette
sagesse. En ordonnant le partage égal des biens, le Titre des
Successions devait laisser chaque enfant presque pauvre et
disperser un jour les richesses du vieux musée Claës. Balthazar,
d’accord avec madame Claës, plaça la fortune de sa femme de
manière à donner à chacun de leurs enfants une position semblable
à celle du père. La maison Claës persista donc dans la modestie de
son train et acheta des bois, un peu maltraités par les guerres qui
avaient eu lieu; mais qui bien conservés devaient prendre à dix ans
de là une valeur énorme. La haute société de Douai, que fréquentait
monsieur Claës, avait su si bien apprécier le beau caractère et les
qualités de sa femme, que, par une espèce de convention tacite, elle
était exemptée des devoirs auxquels les gens de province tiennent
tant. Pendant la saison d’hiver qu’elle passait à la ville, elle allait
rarement dans le monde, et le monde venait chez elle. Elle recevait
tous les mercredis, et donnait trois grands dîners par mois. Chacun
avait senti qu’elle était plus à l’aise dans sa maison, où la retenaient
d’ailleurs sa passion pour son mari et les soins que réclamait
l’éducation de ses enfants. Telle fut, jusqu’en 1809, la conduite de ce
ménage qui n’eut rien de conforme aux idées reçues. La vie de ces
deux êtres, secrètement pleine d’amour et de joie, était
extérieurement semblable à toute autre. La passion de Balthazar
Claës pour sa femme, et que sa femme savait perpétuer, semblait,
comme il le faisait observer lui même, employer sa constance innée
dans la culture du bonheur qui valait bien celle des tulipes vers
laquelle il penchait dès son enfance, et le dispensait d’avoir sa
manie comme chacun de ses ancêtres avait eu la sienne.
A la fin de cette année, l’esprit et les manières de Balthazar
subirent des altérations funestes, qui commencèrent si naturellement
que d’abord madame Claës ne trouva pas nécessaire de lui en
demander la cause. Un soir, son mari se coucha dans un état de
préoccupation qu’elle se fit un devoir de respecter. Sa délicatesse de
femme et ses habitudes de soumission lui avaient toujours laissé
attendre les confidences de Balthazar, dont la confiance lui était
garantie par une affection si vraie qu’elle ne donnait aucune prise à
sa jalousie. Quoique certaine d’obtenir une réponse quand elle se
permettrait une demande curieuse, elle avait toujours conservé de
ses premières impressions dans la vie la crainte d’un refus.
D’ailleurs, la maladie morale de son mari eut des phases, et n’arriva
que par des teintes progressivement plus fortes à cette violence
intolérable qui détruisit le bonheur de son ménage. Quelque occupé
que fût Balthazar, il resta néanmoins, pendant plusieurs mois,
causeur, affectueux, et le changement de son caractère ne se
manifestait alors que par de fréquentes distractions. Madame Claës
espéra longtemps savoir par son mari le secret de ses travaux; peut-
être ne voulait-il l’avouer qu’au moment où ils aboutiraient à des
résultats utiles, car beaucoup d’hommes ont un orgueil qui les
pousse à cacher leurs combats et à ne se montrer que victorieux. Au
jour du triomphe, le bonheur domestique devait donc reparaître
d’autant plus éclatant que Balthazar s’apercevait de cette lacune
dans sa vie amoureuse que son cœur désavouerait sans doute.
Joséphine connaissait assez son mari pour savoir qu’il ne se
pardonnerait pas d’avoir rendu sa Pépita moins heureuse pendant
plusieurs mois. Elle gardait donc le silence en éprouvant une espèce
de joie à souffrir par lui, pour lui; car sa passion avait une teinte de
cette piété espagnole qui ne sépare jamais la foi de l’amour, et ne
comprend point le sentiment sans souffrances. Elle attendait donc
un retour d’affection en se disant chaque soir:—Ce sera demain! et
en traitant son bonheur comme un absent. Elle conçut son dernier
enfant au milieu de ces troubles secrets. Horrible révélation d’un
avenir de douleur! En cette circonstance, l’amour fut, parmi les
distractions de son mari, comme une distraction plus forte que les
autres. Son orgueil de femme, blessé pour la première fois, lui fit
sonder la profondeur de l’abîme inconnu qui la séparait à jamais du
Claës des premiers jours. Dès ce moment, l’état de Balthazar
empira. Cet homme, naguère incessamment plongé dans les joies
domestiques, qui jouait pendant des heures entières avec ses
enfants, se roulait avec eux sur le tapis du parloir ou dans les allées
du jardin, qui semblait ne pouvoir vivre que sous les yeux noirs de sa
Pépita, ne s’aperçut point de la grossesse de sa femme, oublia de
vivre en famille et s’oublia lui-même. Plus madame Claës avait tardé
à lui demander le sujet de ses occupations, moins elle l’osa. A cette
idée, son sang bouillonnait et la voix lui manquait. Enfin elle crut
avoir cessé de plaire à son mari et fut alors sérieusement alarmée.
Cette crainte l’occupa, la désespéra, l’exalta, devint le principe de
bien des heures mélancoliques, et de tristes rêveries. Elle justifia
Balthazar à ses dépens en se trouvant laide et vieille; puis elle
entrevit une pensée généreuse, mais humiliante pour elle, dans le
travail par lequel il se faisait une fidélité négative, et voulut lui rendre
son indépendance en laissant s’établir un de ces secrets divorces, le
mot du bonheur dont paraissent jouir plusieurs ménages.
Néanmoins, avant de dire adieu à la vie conjugale, elle tâcha de lire
au fond de ce cœur, mais elle le trouva fermé. Insensiblement, elle
vit Balthazar devenir indifférent à tout ce qu’il avait aimé, négliger
ses tulipes en fleurs, et ne plus songer à ses enfants. Sans doute il
se livrait à quelque passion en dehors des affections du cœur, mais
qui, selon les femmes, n’en dessèche pas moins le cœur. L’amour
était endormi et non pas enfui. Si ce fut une consolation, le malheur
n’en resta pas moins le même. La continuité de cette crise s’explique
par un seul mot, l’espérance, secret de toutes ces situations
conjugales. Au moment où la pauvre femme arrivait à un degré de
désespoir qui lui prêtait le courage d’interroger son mari;
précisément, alors elle retrouverait de doux moments, pendant
lesquels Balthazar lui prouvait que s’il appartenait à quelques
pensées diaboliques, elles lui permettaient de redevenir parfois lui-
même. Durant ces instants où son ciel s’éclaircissait, elle
s’empressait trop à jouir de son bonheur pour le troubler par des
importunités; puis, quand elle s’était enhardie à questionner
Balthazar, au moment même où elle allait parler, il lui échappait
aussitôt, il la quittait brusquement, ou tombait dans le gouffre de ses
méditations d’où rien ne le pouvait tirer. Bientôt la réaction du moral
sur le physique commença ses ravages, d’abord imperceptibles,
mais néanmoins saisissables à l’œil d’une femme aimante qui suivait
la secrète pensée de son mari dans ses moindres manifestations.
Souvent, elle avait peine à retenir ses larmes en le voyant, après le
dîner, plongé dans une bergère au coin du feu, morne et pensif, l’œil
arrêté sur un panneau noir sans s’apercevoir du silence qui régnait
autour de lui. Elle observait avec terreur les changements
insensibles qui dégradaient cette figure que l’amour avait faite
sublime pour elle. Chaque jour, la vie de l’âme s’en retirait
davantage, la charpente physique restait sans aucune expression.
Parfois, les yeux prenaient une couleur vitreuse; il semblait que la
vue se retournât et s’exerçât à l’intérieur. Quand les enfants étaient
couchés, après quelques heures de silence et de solitude, pleines
de pensées affreuses, si la pauvre Pépita se hasardait à demander:
—Mon ami, souffres-tu? quelquefois Balthazar ne répondait pas; ou,
s’il répondait, il revenait à lui par un tressaillement comme un
homme arraché en sursaut à son sommeil, et disait un non sec et
caverneux qui tombait pesamment sur le cœur de sa femme
palpitante. Quoiqu’elle eût voulu cacher à ses amis la bizarre
situation où elle se trouvait, elle fut cependant obligée d’en parler.
Selon l’usage des petites villes, la plupart des salons avaient fait du
dérangement de Balthazar le sujet de leurs conversations, et déjà
dans certaines sociétés, l’on savait plusieurs détails ignorés de
madame Claës. Aussi, malgré le mutisme commandé par la
politesse, quelques amis témoignèrent-ils de si vives inquiétudes,
qu’elle s’empressa de justifier les singularités de son mari.
—Monsieur Balthazar avait, disait-elle, entrepris un grand travail
qui l’absorbait, mais dont la réussite devait être un sujet de gloire
pour sa famille et pour sa patrie.
Cette explication mystérieuse caressait trop l’ambition d’une ville
où, plus qu’en aucune autre, règne l’amour du pays et le désir de
son illustration, pour qu’elle ne produisît pas dans les esprits une
réaction favorable à monsieur Claës. Les suppositions de sa femme
étaient, jusqu’à un certain point, assez fondées. Plusieurs ouvriers
de diverses professions avaient long-temps travaillé dans le grenier
de la maison de devant, où Balthazar se rendait dès le matin. Après
y avoir fait des retraites de plus en plus longues, auxquelles s’étaient
insensiblement accoutumés sa femme et ses gens, Balthazar en
était arrivé à y demeurer des journées entières. Mais, douleur inouïe!
madame Claës apprit par les humiliantes confidences de ses bonnes
amies étonnées de son ignorance, que son mari ne cessait d’acheter
à Paris des instruments de physique, des matières précieuses, des
livres, des machines, et se ruinait, disait-on, à chercher la pierre
philosophale. Elle devait songer à ses enfants, ajoutaient les amies,
à son propre avenir, et serait criminelle de ne pas employer son
influence pour détourner son mari de la fausse voie où il s’était
engagé. Si madame Claës retrouvait son impertinence de grande
dame pour imposer silence à ces discours absurdes, elle fut prise de
terreur malgré son apparente assurance, et résolut de quitter son
rôle d’abnégation. Elle fit naître une de ces situations pendant
lesquelles une femme est avec son mari sur un pied d’égalité; moins
tremblante alors, elle osa demander à Balthazar la raison de son
changement, et le motif de sa constante retraite. Le Flamand fronça
les sourcils, et lui répondit:—Ma chère, tu n’y comprendrais rien.
Un jour, Joséphine insista pour connaître ce secret en se
plaignant avec douceur de ne pas partager toute la pensée de celui
de qui elle partageait la vie.
 —Puisque cela t’intéresse tant, répondit Balthazar en gardant sa
femme sur ses genoux et lui caressant ses cheveux noirs, je te dirai
que je me suis remis à la chimie, et je suis l’homme le plus heureux
du monde.
Deux ans après l’hiver où monsieur Claës était devenu chimiste,
sa maison avait changé d’aspect. Soit que la société se choquât de
la distraction perpétuelle du savant, ou crût le gêner; soit que ses
anxiétés secrètes eussent rendu madame Claës moins agréable,
elle ne voyait plus que ses amis intimes. Balthazar n’allait nulle part,
s’enfermait dans son laboratoire pendant toute la journée, y restait
parfois la nuit, et n’apparaissait au sein de sa famille qu’à l’heure du
dîner. Dès la deuxième année, il cessa de passer la belle saison à
sa campagne que sa femme ne voulut plus habiter seule.
Quelquefois Balthazar sortait de chez lui, se promenait et ne rentrait
que le lendemain, en laissant madame Claës pendant toute une nuit
livrée à de mortelles inquiétudes; après l’avoir fait infructueusement
chercher dans une ville dont les portes étaient fermées le soir,
suivant l’usage des places fortes, elle ne pouvait envoyer à sa
poursuite dans la campagne. La malheureuse femme n’avait même
plus alors l’espoir mêlé d’angoisses que donne l’attente, et souffrait
jusqu’au lendemain. Balthazar, qui avait oublié l’heure de la
fermeture des portes, arrivait le lendemain tout tranquillement sans
soupçonner les tortures que sa distraction devait imposer à sa
famille; et le bonheur de le revoir était pour sa femme une crise
aussi dangereuse que pouvaient l’être ses appréhensions, elle se
taisait, n’osait le questionner; car, à la première demande qu’elle fit,
il avait répondu d’un air surpris: «Eh! bien, quoi, l’on ne peut pas se
promener.» Les passions ne savent pas tromper. Les inquiétudes de
madame Claës justifièrent donc les bruits qu’elle s’était plu à
démentir. Sa jeunesse l’avait habituée à connaître la pitié polie du
monde; pour ne pas la subir une seconde fois, elle se renferma plus
étroitement dans l’enceinte de sa maison que tout le monde déserta,
même ses derniers amis. Le désordre dans les vêtements, toujours
si dégradant pour un homme de la haute classe, devint tel chez
Balthazar, qu’entre tant de causes de chagrins, ce ne fut pas l’une
des moins sensibles dont s’affecta cette femme habituée à l’exquise
propreté des Flamandes. De concert avec Lemulquinier, valet de
chambre de son mari, Joséphine remédia pendant quelque temps à
la dévastation journalière des habits, mais il fallut y renoncer. Le jour
même où, à l’insu de Balthazar, des effets neufs avaient été
substitués à ceux qui étaient tachés, déchirés ou troués, il en faisait
des haillons. Cette femme heureuse pendant quinze ans, et dont la
jalousie ne s’était jamais éveillée, se trouva tout à coup n’être plus
rien en apparence dans le cœur où elle régnait naguère. Espagnole
d’origine, le sentiment de la femme espagnole gronda chez elle,
quand elle se découvrit une rivale dans la Science qui lui enlevait
son mari; les tourments de la jalousie lui dévorèrent le cœur, et
rénovèrent son amour. Mais que faire contre la Science? comment
en combattre le pouvoir incessant, tyrannique et croissant?
Comment tuer une rivale invisible? Comment une femme, dont le
pouvoir est limité par la nature, peut elle lutter avec une idée dont les
jouissances sont infinies et les attraits toujours nouveaux? Que
tenter contre la coquetterie des idées qui se rafraîchissent,
renaissent plus belles dans les difficultés, et entraînent un homme si
loin du monde qu’il oublie jusqu’à ses plus chères affections? Enfin
un jour, malgré les ordres sévères que Balthazar avait donnés, sa
femme voulut au moins ne pas le quitter, s’enfermer avec lui dans ce
grenier où il se retirait, combattre corps à corps avec sa rivale en
assistant son mari durant les longues heures qu’il prodiguait à cette
terrible maîtresse. Elle voulut se glisser secrètement dans ce
mystérieux atelier de séduction, et acquérir le droit d’y rester
toujours. Elle essaya donc de partager avec Lemulquinier le droit
d’entrer dans le laboratoire; mais, pour ne pas le rendre témoin
d’une querelle qu’elle redoutait, elle attendit un jour où son mari se
passerait du valet de chambre. Depuis quelque temps, elle étudiait
les allées et venues de ce domestique avec une impatience
haineuse; ne savait-il pas tout ce qu’elle désirait apprendre, ce que
son mari lui cachait et ce qu’elle n’osait lui demander; elle trouvait
Lemulquinier plus favorisé qu’elle, elle, l’épouse! Elle vint donc
tremblante et presque heureuse; mais, pour la première fois de sa
vie, elle connut la colère de Balthazar; à peine avait-elle entr’ouvert
la porte, qu’il fondit sur elle, la prit, la jeta rudement sur l’escalier, où
elle faillit rouler du haut en bas.
—Dieu soit loué, tu existes! cria Balthazar en la relevant.
 Un masque de verre s’était brisé en éclats sur madame Claës qui
vit son mari pâle, blême, effrayé.
—Ma chère, je t’avais défendu de venir ici, dit-il en s’asseyant sur
une marche de l’escalier comme un homme abattu. Les saints t’ont
préservée de la mort. Par quel hasard mes yeux étaient-ils fixés sur
la porte? Nous avons failli périr.
—J’aurais été bien heureuse alors, dit-elle.
—Mon expérience est manquée, reprit Balthazar. Je ne puis
pardonner qu’à toi la douleur que me cause ce cruel mécompte.
J’allais peut-être décomposer l’azote. Va, retourne à tes affaires.
Balthazar rentra dans son laboratoire.
—J’allais peut-être décomposer l’azote! se dit la pauvre femme
en revenant dans sa chambre où elle fondit en larmes.
Cette phrase était inintelligible pour elle. Les hommes, habitués
par leur éducation à tout concevoir, ne savent pas ce qu’il y a
d’horrible pour une femme à ne pouvoir comprendre la pensée de
celui qu’elle aime. Plus indulgentes que nous ne le sommes, ces
divines créatures ne nous disent pas quand le langage de leurs
âmes reste incompris; elles craignent de nous faire sentir la
supériorité de leurs sentiments, et cachent alors leurs douleurs avec
autant de joie qu’elles taisent leurs plaisirs méconnus; mais plus
ambitieuses en amour que nous ne le sommes, elles veulent
épouser mieux que le cœur de l’homme, elles en veulent aussi toute
la pensée. Pour madame Claës, ne rien savoir de la Science dont
s’occupait son mari, engendrait dans son âme un dépit plus violent
que celui causé par la beauté d’une rivale. Une lutte de femme à
femme laisse à celle qui aime le plus l’avantage d’aimer mieux; mais
ce dépit accusait une impuissance et humiliait tous les sentiments
qui nous aident à vivre. Joséphine ne savait pas! Il se trouvait, pour
elle, une situation où son ignorance la séparait de son mari. Enfin,
dernière torture, et la plus vive, il était souvent entre la vie et la mort,
il courait des dangers, loin d’elle et près d’elle, sans qu’elle les
partageât, sans qu’elle les connût. C’était, comme l’enfer, une prison
morale sans issue, sans espérance. Madame Claës voulut au moins
connaître les attraits de cette science, et se mit à étudier en secret la
chimie dans les livres. Cette famille fut alors comme cloîtrée.
Telles furent les transitions successives par lesquelles le malheur
fit passer la maison Claës, avant de l’amener à l’espèce de mort
civile dont elle est frappée au moment où cette histoire commence.
Cette situation violente se compliqua. Comme toutes les femmes
passionnées, madame Claës était d’un désintéressement inouï.
Ceux qui aiment véritablement savent combien l’argent est peu de
chose auprès des sentiments, et avec quelle difficulté il s’y agrège.
Néanmoins Joséphine n’apprit pas sans une cruelle émotion que
son mari devait trois cent mille francs hypothéqués sur ses
propriétés. L’authenticité des contrats sanctionnait les inquiétudes,
les bruits, les conjectures de la ville. Madame Claës, justement
alarmée, fut forcée, elle si fière, de questionner le notaire de son
mari, de le mettre dans le secret de ses douleurs ou de les lui laisser
deviner, et d’entendre enfin cette humiliante question: «Comment
monsieur Claës ne vous a-t-il encore rien dit?» Heureusement le
notaire de Balthazar lui était presque parent, et voici comment. Le
grand-père de monsieur Claës avait épousé une Pierquin d’Anvers,
de la même famille que les Pierquin de Douai. Depuis ce mariage,
ceux-ci, quoique étrangers aux Claës, les traitaient de cousins.
Monsieur Pierquin, jeune homme de vingt-six ans qui venait de
succéder à la charge de son père, était la seule personne qui eût
accès dans la maison Claës. Madame Balthazar avait depuis
plusieurs mois vécu dans une si complète solitude que le notaire fut
obligé de lui confirmer la nouvelle des désastres déjà connus dans
toute la ville. Il lui dit que, vraisemblablement, son mari devait des
sommes considérables à la maison qui lui fournissait des produits
chimiques. Après s’être enquis de la fortune et de la considération
dont jouissait monsieur Claës, cette maison accueillait toutes ses
demandes et faisait les envois sans inquiétude, malgré l’étendue des
crédits. Madame Claës chargea Pierquin de demander le mémoire
des fournitures faites à son mari. Deux mois après, messieurs
Protez et Chiffreville, fabricants de produits chimiques, adressèrent
un arrêté de compte, qui montait à cent mille francs. Madame Claës
et Pierquin étudièrent cette facture avec une surprise croissante. Si
beaucoup d’articles, exprimés scientifiquement ou
commercialement, étaient pour eux inintelligibles, ils furent effrayés
de voir portés en compte des parties de métaux, des diamants de
toutes les espèces, mais en petites quantités. Le total de la dette
s’expliquait facilement par la multiplicité des articles, par les
précautions que nécessitait le transport de certaines substances ou
l’envoi de quelques machines précieuses, par le prix exorbitant de
plusieurs produits qui ne s’obtenaient que difficilement, ou que leur
rareté rendait chers, enfin par la valeur des instruments de physique
ou de chimie confectionnés d’après les instructions de monsieur
Claës. Le notaire, dans l’intérêt de son cousin, avait pris des
renseignements sur les Protez et Chiffreville, et la probité de ces
négociants devait rassurer sur la moralité de leurs opérations avec
monsieur Claës à qui, d’ailleurs, ils faisaient souvent part des
résultats obtenus par les chimistes de Paris, afin de lui éviter des
dépenses. Madame Claës pria le notaire de cacher à la société de
Douai la nature de ces acquisitions qui eussent été taxées de folies;
mais Pierquin lui répondit que déjà, pour ne point affaiblir la
considération dont jouissait Claës, il avait retardé jusqu’au dernier
moment les obligations notariées que l’importance des sommes
prêtées de confiance par ses clients avait enfin nécessitées. Il
dévoila l’étendue de la plaie, en disant à sa cousine que, si elle ne
trouvait pas le moyen d’empêcher son mari de dépenser sa fortune
si follement, dans six mois les biens patrimoniaux seraient grevés
d’hypothèques qui en dépasseraient la valeur. Quant à lui, ajouta-t-il,
les observations qu’il avait faites à son cousin, avec les
ménagements dus à un homme si justement considéré, n’avaient
pas eu la moindre influence. Une fois pour toutes, Balthazar lui avait
répondu qu’il travaillait à la gloire et à la fortune de sa famille. Ainsi,
à toutes les tortures de cœur que madame Claës avait supportées
depuis deux ans, dont chacune s’ajoutait à l’autre et accroissait la
douleur du moment de toutes les douleurs passées, se joignit une
crainte affreuse, incessante qui lui rendait l’avenir épouvantable. Les
femmes ont des pressentiments dont la justesse tient du prodige.
Pourquoi en général tremblent-elles plus qu’elles n’espèrent quand il
s’agit des intérêts de la vie? Pourquoi n’ont-elles de foi que pour les
grandes idées de l’avenir religieux? Pourquoi devinent-elles si
habilement les catastrophes de fortune ou les crises de nos
destinées? Peut-être le sentiment qui les unit à l’homme qu’elles
aiment, leur en fait-il admirablement peser les forces, estimer les
facultés, connaître les goûts, les passions, les vices, les vertus; la
perpétuelle étude de ces causes en présence desquelles elles se
trouvent sans cesse, leur donne sans doute la fatale puissance d’en
prévoir les effets dans toutes les situations possibles. Ce qu’elles
voient du présent leur fait juger l’avenir avec une habileté
naturellement expliquée par la perfection de leur système nerveux,
qui leur permet de saisir les diagnostics les plus légers de la pensée
et des sentiments. Tout en elles vibre à l’unisson des grandes
commotions morales. Ou elles sentent, ou elles voient. Or, quoique
séparée de son mari depuis deux ans, madame Claës pressentait la
perte de sa fortune. Elle avait apprécié la fougue réfléchie,
l’inaltérable constance de Balthazar; s’il était vrai qu’il cherchât à
faire de l’or, il devait jeter avec une parfaite insensibilité son dernier
morceau de pain dans son creuset; mais que cherchait-il? Jusque-là,
le sentiment maternel et l’amour conjugal s’étaient si bien confondus
dans le cœur de cette femme, que jamais ses enfants, également
aimés d’elle et de son mari, ne s’étaient interposés entre eux. Mais
tout à coup elle fut parfois plus mère qu’elle n’était épouse,
quoiqu’elle fût plus souvent épouse que mère. Et néanmoins,
quelque disposée qu’elle pût être à sacrifier sa fortune et même ses
enfants au bonheur de celui qui l’avait choisie, aimée, adorée, et
pour qui elle était encore la seule femme qu’il y eût au monde, les
remords que lui causait la faiblesse de son amour maternel la
jetaient en d’horribles alternatives. Ainsi, comme femme, elle
souffrait dans son cœur; comme mère, elle souffrait dans ses
enfants; et comme chrétienne, elle souffrait pour tous. Elle se taisait
et contenait ces cruels orages dans son âme. Son mari, seul arbitre
du sort de sa famille, était le maître d’en régler à son gré la destinée,
il n’en devait compte qu’à Dieu. D’ailleurs, pouvait-elle lui reprocher
l’emploi de sa fortune, après le désintéressement dont il avait fait
preuve pendant dix années de mariage? Était-elle juge de ses
desseins? Mais sa conscience, d’accord avec le sentiment et les
lois, lui disait que les parents étaient les dépositaires de la fortune, et
n’avaient pas le droit d’aliéner le bonheur matériel de leurs enfants.
Pour ne point résoudre ces hautes questions, elle aimait mieux
fermer les yeux, suivant l’habitude des gens qui refusent de voir
l’abîme au fond duquel ils savent devoir rouler. Depuis six mois, son
mari ne lui avait plus remis d’argent pour la dépense de sa maison.
Elle fit vendre secrètement à Paris les riches parures de diamants
que son frère lui avait données au jour de son mariage, et introduisit
la plus stricte économie dans sa maison. Elle renvoya la
gouvernante de ses enfants, et même la nourrice de Jean. Jadis le
luxe des voitures était ignoré de la bourgeoisie à la fois si humble
dans ses mœurs, si fière dans ses sentiments; rien n’avait donc été
prévu dans la maison Claës pour cette invention moderne, Balthazar
était obligé d’avoir son écurie et sa remise dans une maison en face
de la sienne; ses occupations ne lui permettaient plus de surveiller
cette partie du ménage qui regarde essentiellement les hommes;
madame Claës supprima la dépense onéreuse des équipages et des
gens que son isolement rendait inutiles, et malgré la bonté de ces
raisons, elle n’essaya point de colorer ses réformes par des
prétextes. Jusqu’à présent les faits avaient démenti ses paroles, et
le silence était désormais ce qui convenait le mieux. Le changement
du train des Claës n’était pas justifiable dans un pays où, comme en
Hollande, quiconque dépense tout son revenu passe pour un fou.
Seulement, comme sa fille aînée, Marguerite, allait avoir seize ans,
Joséphine parut vouloir lui faire faire une belle alliance, et la placer
dans le monde, comme il convenait à une fille alliée aux Molina, aux
Van-Ostrom-Temninck, et aux Casa-Réal. Quelques jours avant celui
pendant lequel commence cette histoire, l’argent des diamants était
épuisé. Ce même jour, à trois heures, en conduisant ses enfants à
vêpres, madame Claës avait rencontré Pierquin qui venait la voir, et
qui l’accompagna jusqu’à Saint-Pierre, en causant à voix basse sur
sa situation.
—Ma cousine, dit-il, je ne saurais, sans manquer à l’amitié qui
m’attache à votre famille, vous cacher le péril où vous êtes, et ne
pas vous prier d’en conférer avec votre mari. Qui peut, si ce n’est
vous, l’arrêter sur le bord de l’abîme où vous marchez. Les revenus
des biens hypothéqués ne suffisent point à payer les intérêts des
sommes empruntées; ainsi vous êtes aujourd’hui sans aucun
revenu. Si vous coupiez les bois que vous possédez, ce serait vous
enlever la seule chance de salut qui vous restera dans l’avenir. Mon
cousin Balthazar est en ce moment débiteur d’une somme de trente
mille francs à la maison Protez et Chiffreville de Paris, avec quoi les
payerez-vous, avec quoi vivrez-vous? et que deviendrez-vous si
Claës continue à demander des réactifs, des verreries, des piles de
Volta et autres brimborions. Toute votre fortune, moins la maison et
le mobilier, s’est dissipée en gaz et en charbon. Quand il a été
question, avant-hier, d’hypothéquer sa maison, savez-vous quelle a
été la réponse de Claës: «Diable!» Voilà depuis trois ans la première
trace de raison qu’il ait donnée.
Madame Claës pressa douloureusement le bras de Pierquin, leva
les yeux au ciel, et dit:—Gardez-nous le secret.
Malgré sa piété, la pauvre femme anéantie par ces paroles d’une
clarté foudroyante ne put prier, elle resta sur sa chaise entre ses
enfants, ouvrit son paroissien et n’en tourna pas un feuillet; elle était
tombée dans une contemplation aussi absorbante que l’étaient les
méditations de son mari. L’honneur espagnol, la probité flamande
résonnaient dans son âme d’une voix aussi puissante que celle de
l’orgue. La ruine de ses enfants était consommée! Entre eux et
l’honneur de leur père, il ne fallait plus hésiter. La nécessité d’une
lutte prochaine entre elle et son son mari l’épouvantait; il était à ses
yeux, si grand, si imposant, que la seule perspective de sa colère
l’agitait autant que l’idée de la majesté divine. Elle allait donc sortir
de cette constante soumission dans laquelle elle était saintement
demeurée comme épouse. L’intérêt de ses enfants l’obligerait à
contrarier dans ses goûts un homme qu’elle idolâtrait. Ne faudrait-il
pas souvent le ramener à des questions positives, quand il planerait
dans les hautes régions de la Science, le tirer violemment d’un riant
avenir pour le plonger dans ce que la matérialité présente de plus
hideux, aux artistes et aux grands hommes. Pour elle, Balthazar
Claës était un géant de science, un homme gros de gloire; il ne
pouvait l’avoir oubliée que pour les plus riches espérances; puis, il
était si profondément sensé, elle l’avait entendu parler avec tant de
talent sur les questions de tout genre, qu’il devait être sincère en
disant qu’il travaillait pour la gloire et la fortune de sa famille.
L’amour de cet homme pour sa femme et ses enfants n’était pas