Charles Graves - Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 3 of 4.—1874-1892

"In addition to the above, the Committee had sent up to the Baths the day before the opening, one dozen bottles of whiskey, 48s.; one dozen gin, 36s.; half-a-dozen brandy, 84s.; half-a-dozen port, 48s.; half-a-dozen sherry, 48s.; two dozen soda, 4s. 6d.; one dozen lemonade, 4s. 6d.; one dozen potass, 4s. 6d.; two boxes cigars, 22s. 6d. each; and half-a-dozen bottles of St. Julien, 36s.; making a total of £52 2s. paid to the proprietors of the Queen's Hotel."

He adds that strenuous efforts have been made to find out the Gentleman who called for Mild Ale, and, when got, consumed a shilling's-worth of it.

If there were many such auditors, audits would form a most amusing portion of our comic literature.

In these circumstances Punch expressed a natural joy that Municipal Reform was tackled at last in Sir William Harcourt's Bill, while in his "Bitter Cry of Alderman and Bumble" he showed these two worthies bursting into tears over the iniquities of "Werdant 'Arcourt."

The housing problem comes up early in 1877 à propos of the late Sir B. W. Richardson's hygienic theories. Punch admits that he was probably on the right track, but waxes sarcastic at the expense of crotchety alarmists, and his own suggestions are more whimsical than helpful. It was not until 1883 that he began to take the problem seriously. I deal in another section with the fashionable craze for "slumming," which Punch ridiculed as insincere and absurd. But there is genuine indignation in his verses on a judge's remarks at Manchester, and on the report of an inquest, at which it came out that a whole family occupied one bed on the floor; in the poem (after Hood) on the Real Haunted House, comparing slum dwellers with rural labourers; in the cartoon, "Mammon's Rents," on the text, "Dives, the owner of property condemned as unfit for habitation, is getting from 50 to 60 per cent. on his money"; and in "The Slum-dweller's Saturday Night" (after Burns), where Punch

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Bright had recently made a vehement speech at Manchester against the Turks. It was about the same time that he described Lord Salisbury as "prostrating his intellect (to Lord Beaconsfield) in hope of a succession that might never come."

Major O'Gorman does not appear in the D.N.B. But he inspired an immortal comment from a sympathetic compatriot, who calling to inquire about the Major's progress during a serious illness, was told that he was being kept up by periodic teaspoonfuls of brandy. "Tayspoons!" was the indignant retort. "And what use 'ud a tayspoon be, sthrayin' about in such a wilderness of a man?"