BEFORE THE CARTOON 2: Comic cuts and conversational captions

 by John Adcock

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Masthead: The Penny Satirist No 1, April 22, 1837

‘I wish we had an agent in Dundee; he might sell five or six hundred (Penny Satirist) in a week. We have fellows who clear 10s. a day by selling them in the street, but the brutes go idle the rest of the week.’ — James Elishama “Shepherd” Smith, 1801-1857

Penny Satirist, April 29, 1837

The Penny Satirist, which called itself “a weekly satirical newspaper” featured the first sustained use of front-page political cartoons in London. The first number of the Penny Satirist arrived in the streets of London on April 22, 1837. That title came to an end on April 25, 1843, and the paper was continued as the London Pioneer. Benjamin Cousins was the printer. 

William Rayner writing in Notes & Queries, June 15, 1872, identified the editor as Barnard Gregory, notorious proprietor of the blackmailing periodical The Satirist. He was mistaken. The founder and editor of the Penny Satirist was James Elishama Smith (1801-1857), known as “Shepherd” Smith after his periodical the Shepherd. For many years he was editor of the popular Family Herald story paper. Mr. Newton Crosland wrote, presumably to W.A. Smith on 17th April 17, 1892: —

‘I cannot tell you much about the Penny Satirist, and I do not imagine that the authorities would find room in the museum for such a publication. Of course, fifty-four years ago a penny paper was a much rougher article than what we should expect to get for the same money nowadays. The Penny Satirist was one sheet (4 pages), the size of an ordinary newspaper; but it was not a newspaper in the ordinary acceptation of the term, as it was exempt from the newspaper stamp, and it did not live on advertisements. The type was worn, the paper common, the woodcuts coarse, and its whole appearance vulgar and disreputable from an artistic point of view; but under Mr. Smith's superintendence nothing was allowed to appear in its columns of a demoralizing character. He managed to make its contents respectable.’ — “Shepherd” Smith the Universalist [p.168]

And on November 3, 1837, a letter from James E. Smith to his elder brother John —

‘The Penny Satirist has been above 40,000 a week, but several scamps have tried to put us down—some by stealing our name, and others by a rival publication and underselling. We have been obliged to lower our prices to put the latter down, otherwise it would be a fine property. It has a fine circulation and is read by all classes.

I was told by a gentleman, who is intimate with some of the foreign embassies, that in dining at Buckingham Palace this ambassador said he saw the Countess of Leiningen, the Queen's sister-in-law, with the Penny Satirist in her hand. This same gentleman sends regularly a copy to the Duchess of Somerset, and this morning the gentleman who machines the paper —a large printer in London, who is worth considerable property —told me that, in calling on a barrister of good practice in town, he saw the Penny Satirist, with other papers, lying on his drawing-room table. The circulation of the paper, therefore, is not confined to the poor, although they are our best patrons. We have every reason to believe that the Queen herself has frequently read it.’ — “Shepherd” Smith the Universalist [p.168]

The Penny Satirist was not the first periodical resembling a newspaper to make use of comic woodcuts. The earliest publications containing comic cuts I have found listed was The Original Comic Magazine: No. 1, With Seven Cuts which cost 6d and was published by another radical pressman, J. Duncombe in 1832. The famous penny blood publisher Edward Lloyd published a penny paper called The Weekly Penny Comic Magazine; or, Repertory of Wit and Humour, edited by Thomas Prest and featuring the cuts of the prolific C. J. Grant, also in 1832. Unfortunately, I have never personally examined either of these publications, they exist today only as advertisements in the Poor Man’s Guardian and other radical newspapers.

Robert Cruikshank, The Satirist, Jan 11, 1835

The Satirist; or, Censor of The Times (HERE) ran from 10 April, 1831 to 15 December 1849. Barnard Gregory and Hewson Clarke were the main contributors. Robert Cruikshank, brother of George Cruikshank and engraver G. Armstrong contributed a political cartoon series called ‘Our Portrait Gallery’ beginning January 4, 1835, which continued for approximately one year. Gregory was the registered proprietor, printer and publisher at no. 334, strand, Middlesex.

‘Our Portrait Gallery’ were comic cuts with long rhyming text under the engravings, following the form of the early comicalities in Bell’s Life in London. The Penny Satirist was different, they placed conversational captions under the cuts. They anticipated the cartoon “socials” of Punch, Judy, and similar comic journals of a later time. The style was carried on by the Odd Fellow (HERE), a weekly satirical newspaper which lasted from Jan 5, 1839, to Dec 10, 1842. The Odd Fellow publisher was Henry Hetherington, a radical pressman famous for his Poor Man’s Guardian.

Cleave’s London Satirist & Gazette of Variety began on Oct 14, 1837, changed to Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety then Cleave’s Gazette of Variety ending Jan 1844. The proprietor of the unstamped paper was John Cleave, wholesale bookseller and newsagent situated in Shoe Lane. Patricia Hollis in The Pauper Press (1970) wrote that at “the beginning of 1836 Cleave’s Gazette was thought to have a circulation of 40,000.”

The leading caricaturist, and possibly the inventor of the caption style that replaced rhymes, was Charles Jameson Grant. Mathew Crowther wrote on Yesterday’s Papers on Feb 28, 2011 (HERE), that

‘From 1837 onwards most of Grant’s output was confined to the pages of the Penny Satirist and Cleave’s London Satirist & Gazette of Variety. Interestingly Grant and Cleave also launched a separate, short-lived, broadsheet called Cleave’s Gallery of Grant's Comicalities which doesn't seem to have run to more than a few editions in 1837 and which focused on whimsical social humour rather than politics.’

CJG was the most conspicuous signature to appear on cartoons in both the Penny Satirist and Cleave’s. Indeed, very few other names appear on the cuts except for Hine. It seems very likely, given his prolific contributions to the unstamped penny press that CJ Grant was the innovator of the caption style commentary running under comic cuts in the radical London Press which would carry on well into the twentieth century in London and the United States. Even Hearst’s Journal comic supplements featured caption comics on Sunday amid the works utilizing balloons or dumb show. It could also very well be that captions were imported from continental Europe and its newspaper and periodical equivalent to the penny press.

The captions in the Penny Satirist at first could run to long length and it was the unknown caricaturists of the Odd Fellow who shortened the form to bite-sized portions of text, more often “social” than political humor, rather like the gag cartoons and single-panel dailies of the twentieth century. It was the style of the Odd Fellow cuts that would prove most adaptable to the pages of the comic journals (including Punch) and newspapers of the unforeseeable future.

‘Shepherd’ Smith the Universalist the story of a mind being a life of The Rev. James E. Smith, M.A., William Anderson Smith, London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1892

Read Part I – London to Glasgow and back again: BEFORE THE CARTOON (HERE)

Yesterday's Papers. Today's Views. by Huib van Opstal (HERE)

One Hundred Comicalities (HERE)

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The Great Horse Hoax –

 LEO CARILLO

‘The First Reader’, by Harry Hansen, The Pittsburgh Press, August 13, 1943

Horseplay doesn’t get much attention in this soberly serious town nowadays. Practical jokes are considered amateurish and foolish antics, symptoms of a fading mentality. A man can’t stand on his head in front of the Public Library without giving his wife grounds for divorce. Obviously, we have grown up, but the crazy cavorting of the old days must have been fun for spectators.

Leo Carillo, Variety 20, 1910

I don’t doubt that one of the liveliest of hoaxes was that of the horse lost in the subway, which Harry J. Coleman, the veteran newspaper photographer, describes in his rambling and rattlety-bang reminiscences, “Give Us a Little Smile, Baby.” This happened in 1903, a long time ago, surely, but as important to some people as Washington’s farewell in Fraunce’s Tavern and the Big Blizzard that tied up the Long Island Railroad. The horse, as Harry Coleman describes it, was the invention of a vaudeville comedian named Leo Carillo, who could imitate the call of a wild stallion on the lone prairie, hitherto unheard in the New York subway.

Leo Carillo, Variety 18, 1910

You have to take into consideration two elements now missing: the practice of making the rounds of “the better bars,” which was being built and there was Harry Coleman and the two cartoonists – TAD and George Herriman, and the fact that the subway was just being built and there was every likelihood that a horse might fall into it. TAD and his pals put on an act at a subway tunnel and Carillo bellowed and neighed, and soon a crowd collected. “The police reserves arrived with ropes, ladders, and sappers.” Shovel bearers arrived from the white wings. The fire department arrived with ladders. It was early dawn and there were plenty of alcoholic celebrants afloat. Carillo sped up and down the subway whinnying and neighing.

Its one of those stories that gains in the telling, and at the end Coleman says the scene was “an inextricable mass of fire department equipment, police squads, milkmen, and drunks, all engaged in the largest horse hunt in history and the most frustrated.

I am not one to deny that it happened. I wasn’t there. Moreover, Coleman is yarning about the exploits of the past, and that’s good even in these days, when drinks come high. In that day, long ago, when “drug stores sold drugs,” TAD (He was the late Thomas A. Dorgan) was quite a joker.

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Cartoonist Quotes –

THOMAS ALOYSIUS DORGAN 

"TAD" [1877-1929]

Silk Hat Harry's Divorce Suit, July 3, 1913

“I started ‘Judge Rummy,’ ‘Bunk,’ and the other dogs during the trial of Harry Thaw; they sort of ‘kidded’ the case and became popular. I have been drawing these characters ever since. The 'Indoor Sports’ I thought of about seven years ago (1912), when I was confined to my home with rheumatism. I thought what a lovely indoor sport it was, this sitting around the house looking llke the wreck of the Hesperus. Other indoor sports suggested themselves and this series has been going on ever since… I might add that It was Judge Rummy who first called the Ford car a “flivver.” – TAD Dorgan, ‘Are Cartoonists Doleful?,’ The Sun, May 25, 1919

It was reported in the Boston Sunday Post in 1929 that Dorgan’s “Indoor Sports” was syndicated to 20,000,000 readers daily. His salary was well over six figures yearly…

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Cartoonist Quotes –

 WALT HOBAN

"It is easier to make a good picture than a bad one. If the picture is good you feel that it is good and sail clear through it. If it’s bad it’s torture to grind it out.

 

If you look back ten years (1916) at any comic strip that has been running right along to the present time, you will find that the characters have changed in appearance. Characters change without consent of the cartoonist at all. They get away from you. The changes are so gradual half the time the cartoonist is not conscious of them.

Most people say they are astonished at the developments in the comic art field during the past ten years. I’m not astonished. They are perfectly natural developments and I expected them.

There’s a lot of artistic talk going around these days. I make no pretensions of being an artist. I just do my own work in my own way." – ‘Jerry on the Job’ Is Widely Popular, (Alexander Somalian in The Fourth Estate), Binghamton NY Press, August 6, 1926

[Motion Picture Herald, May 5, 1934]

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The Sporting Page –

Sid Smith sporting cartoon, Oct 15, 1909. Nearly every major cartoonist drew sporting cartoons at one time or another: Billy DeBeck, Bud Fisher, Geo. Herriman, Harry Hershfield, and Sid Smith for the Chicago Examiner (Buck Nix appearance on the right).

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COLLECTING ALLY SLOPER:

 THE RARE “SLOPER FAMILY” CARD SET or “IF YA CAN’T WIN ‘EM…PRINT ‘EM”!

by Bill Leach

This card back image comes from the rare German children’s book “ALLY SLOPER AND THE PAINT POT”.

As an avid collector of Ally Sloper art and objects, I had been trying to find a set of the unsanctioned SLOPER FAMILY playing cards.  I had only seen two sets in all my years of collecting.  The first set was on another collector’s web page and was NOT for sale…but he was kind enough to send me scans of his set.

This is the complete set of SLOPER FAMILY cards featuring all four ethnic suits.  There are 48 cards in the deck.  Another set of four cards and two Jokers were added in order to create a contemporary set of cards.

Then years later a set popped up on EBAY.  I placed my bid and won the set for a reasonable price.  I paid for the purchase and a day later the seller wrote me stating that he had cancelled my bid, refunded my money and that they were no longer available.  Well, we all know what that means….the seller was offered a better price from another person….so he sold the cards (and his personal integrity) to another person. By cancelling my bid it took away my ability to leave a negative feedback.  I guess people without any integrity know how to work the system.  Well, I was very disappointed, but what can you do?  You can’t force a person to be honest even when they are contractually and morally obligated to do the right thing.  So I had to live with the fact that I had lost out on the set of cards that I had so dearly wanted to add to my collection. 

I looked at the scans the other collector sent me and wondered if he would be willing to send me better scans, so I could print them out.  He responded and let me know that he could not scan them again as he had since matted and framed the set.  Then he followed up by letting me know that he had decided to sell them and they were at an auction house in the UK.  So I signed up for the auction and waited.  I was a bit concerned, in addition to the auction house fees, there were VAT taxes and a very high price to pack and send the large framed piece to the US.  But I was willing to pay the price and waited patiently for the day of the auction.  There is an 8 hour difference between the US and the UK, so I waited until the wee hours of the morning and signed into the live auction being streamed over my computer.  I watched lot after lot go by, waiting for my chance to bid on the SLOPER FAMILY card set.  Finally it was time.  I was set to go.  The lots were flying through at a rapid pace and it was my turn to bid.  I clicked on the BID button…nothing happened…clicked and clicked again, until  I heard the auctioneer state that the lot had closed, with me sitting frustrated at my computer, never even getting a single bid through to the auction house.  The set sold for a fair price…a bit more than I had paid through EBAY, and I was devastated.  I complained to my wife and told her what had happened.  She was sympathetic but after a few hours of my moaning and complaining she had had enough and told me to put on my “big boy pants” and get over it.  Well, the nerve of some people!!!

The SLOPER FAMILY card set hammered out at 220 pounds even without my bid!

But she was right, I was wasting time and energy on something that was out of my control….I could no more change my fate at the auction house, than I could change the lack of moral compass of the EBAY seller who refunded my legitimate purchase, so he could sell it to out from under me.  What to do…WHAT TO DO?!!!

I decided if I could not add a set of these turn of the century cards to my collection I would print up a set from the scans the first collector sent me.  But the scan quality was poor and the cards were not in the best of shape.  I consulted with a few friends that were very computer literate in the digital arts.  They gave me a lot of advice and I was able to carefully clean, repair and recolor each card, making them look better than new.  I enhanced the color and pixel by pixel corrected the misprinted and misaligned areas.  I also changed the numbers and suits so the cards could be used in contemporary gaming.

Each card was carefully repaired.  The text was replaced and any misaligned printing was corrected.  The background color was replaced and figural colors were enhanced.

But now I had to create some extra cards, as it was one set of cards shy of a modern deck, and there were no Jokers.  I also needed an image for the back of the cards.  I took a wonderful image from a very rare German book “Ally Sloper and the Paint Pot” and used it for the card backs.  But what could I do about the other two cards?  I had a set of “TRIPLEM” cards.  This game has each character divided into three parts, and the game is to reconstruct the characters to win.  I took the three cards with Ally Sloper’s image and scanned them as one.  After carefully cleaning and repairing the cards, I had one solid image to use for the ACE.  I used this same image on all four suits…or “families”.  As for the Joker, I used another three cards from the TRIPLEM deck…I used Mr. Punch, from the PUNCH comic newspaper.  Now I realize that Mr. Punch was NOT part of the Sloper Family, but he IS the Joker and is dressed as such, so I cleaned him up and used him with good justification.  There is a connection of this character to Sloper.  Ally Sloper was first published in the pages of JUDY, a comic newspaper in 1867.  JUDY was the rival paper of the long standing PUNCH newspaper (referencing the old Punch and Judy puppet show characters).  While they were two separate entities, they did go hand in hand….like peanut butter and jelly.  So using Mr. Punch as the Joker just seemed like a good fit. 

The TRIPLEM card game features each character broken up into three parts.  The object is to build complete characters.

The TRIPLEM decks’ ALLY SLOPER and MR. PUNCH before being digitally assembled.

ALLY SLOPER and MR. PUNCH after being reassembled.

The SLOPER FAMILY card set is very ethnic, some might call it racist.  But it was a product of the 1890s and was created and sold without permission.  There were four suits, but instead of hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades, the creator used ethnic families:  ENGLISH, CHINESE, EGYPTIAN and AFRICAN.  Each card represented a person in the Sloper Family and their personas and names changed with the varied ethnicities.  Today’s gaming companies would never be so bold as to use these various ethnic personalities, but in the 1890s, it must have been fair game. 

The ENGLISH suit of THE SLOPER FAMILY CARD GAME

The CHINESE suit of THE SLOPER FAMILY CARD GAME

The EGYPTIAN suit of THE SLOPER FAMILY CARD GAME

The AFRICAN suit of THE SLOPER FAMILY CARD GAME

It took me over an hour to repair each card, but in the end I had a nice digital card set.  Initially I was going to print up one set at the local print shop on one of their nice printers/copiers.  But they could not run card stock through the machine.  So I decided to have them professionally printed by an online gaming company.  I was shocked when I found out how much it would cost for one set of cards.  In the end I decided to print two dozen sets, which brought the price down quite a bit.  So I got the set for my collection and a case of card sets to sell to my collector friends.  Then I realized, I don’t have ANY collector friends that collect Ally Sloper.  This situation is a double-edged sword; on one hand, I don’t have any competition when collecting Sloper material, at least not from US collectors.  But I also don’t have any friends that I can brag to about my Sloper treasures, nor do I have any friends with Sloper material that I can buy, sell or trade with.  They say no man is an island, but I am a man all alone on the Sloper Sandbar. 

This partial set of THE SLOPER FAMILY CARDS were printed much smaller. The deck featured four each of only the ENGLISH suit printed with black ink. The print quality was very poor.

There was also another unsanctioned set of THE SLOPER FAMILY GAME.  The set used the same imagery but was printed in black and white and eliminated the ethnic cards by using four each of the “ENGLISH” suits.  This set was smaller and very poorly printed. 

How did I become such an obsessed SLOPERIAN COLLECTOR?  It all goes back to the early eighties.  A crazy collector friend of mine named Ronald Graham called me up and said, “Bill, you have to buy this book….I don’t have the money, but you need to get this book.  It is a really rare bound volume of Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday”.  He gave me a phone number and I called it.  The book was about $65.00 and contained a years’ worth of weekly comic newspapers from 1898 featuring the title character ALLY SLOPER on the cover and throughout.  What Ronald Graham did not know, and what caused me to take his advice was that my Mother’s maiden name was Sloper and my Sloper lineage goes all the way back to the 1500’s in England, Scotland and Ireland.  So when the book arrived, I shared it with my Mother and we both got a kick out of it.  So much that I decided to try and collect MORE Sloper art and objects.  This is a bit harder to do than I thought.  Most Sloper items I have found are not in the US and dealing with auction houses and postage can be an expensive proposition.  But over the last forty years, and a big thanks to the internet, I have been able to amass the largest collection of Sloper original art and merchandise in the world.   I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.

The SLOPER FAMILY burial plot in Northern California now includes Bill Leach's parents, James H. Leach and Shirley Mae Leach formerly Shirley Mae Sloper.

My parents have since passed and are buried in the Sloper Family plot in Northern California.  I will be there someday….but not today.  Today I share my newly printed SLOPER FAMILY CARD SET with all of you.  Cheers! 

Bill Leach poses with his newly printed SLOPER FAMILY cards in front of an original 1899 illustration from ALLY SLOPER'S CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY.

I had to print 24 sets to make them affordable.  If anyone would like to obtain a set of these cards….please contact me, Bill Leach at: ComicArt4u@comcast.net  I only have a small number of these sets left and doubt I will have any more printed.  I am asking $25.00 plus shipping per deck. 

 

The Tragic Life of Thomas Mayhew

 

by Robert J. Kirkpatrick 

The name of Mayhew will be very familiar to students of 19^th century literature. Henry Mayhew was one of the founders of Punch, but perhaps better-known for his monumental work London Labour and the London Poor. His brother Horace was a journalist (he wrote for, amongst others, The Illustrated London News and Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper) and comic novelist; and another brother, Augustus, was a journalist (on The Illustrated Times), novelist and comic dramatist. A fourth brother, Thomas, also had a very brief and ultimately tragic career as an author, and consequently has been all but airbrushed from history.

The Mayhew brothers were born into a wealthy family headed by Joshua Dorset Joseph Mayhew, a solicitor, and his wife Mary Ann. Their first son, Thomas Charles Wilson Mayhew, was born on 19 May 1807 and baptised at St. James’s Church, Westminster, on 1 March 1811. He entered Westminster School on 31 May 1820, and after leaving he was articled to his father for five years in November 1825, and wrote his first book, A Complete History of an Action at Law, published by J. & W. Clarke, whilst still a student at Lincoln’s Inn (to which he been admitted in January 1827) in 1828. Two years later, his translation of the French drama Ambition, or Marie Mignot, was performed at the Haymarket Theatre, with the script published by Thomas Richardson in the same year. Also in 1830 he was enrolled as Attorney of the Court of the King’s Bench, and was subsequently admitted as Attorney of the Court of Common Pleas.

His journalistic activities also began in 1830, when he became editor of Henry Hetherington’s Penny Papers for the People, an unstamped series of one penny weekly pamphlets, and the following year he edited the first issues of Hetherington’s The Poor Man’s Guardian. A syndicated newspaper article after his death claimed that he was “the proprietor of Barnett’s Library of Music, The Parterre, and a number of other literary productions…. [and] part proprietor of the Fitzroy Theatre,”[1] although his assocaition with The Parterre was subsequently denied by its editors.[2] A subsequent article claimed that he was also “the proprietor and projector of several cheap popular works,” and was “connected at one time with Figaro, The Studio, compiler of The Diamond Shakespeare, superintended and almost wholly edited The Popular Dictionary of Universal Information…..”[3]

In the meantime, he had married Catharine Lawrance (born in Somerset in around 1806) at St. James’s Church, Westminster, on 1 January 1831. They had a still-born son on 20 November 1831, but went on to have a daughter, Catharine Mary Anne, born on 15 October 1833.

As a solicitor, he was briefly in partnership in 1831 with Thomas Edlyne Tomlins, as Tomlins and Mayhew, at 3 Staple Inn, and he was also in partnership with his father and James Johnson at 26 Carey Street, Lincoln’s Inn, but he left in March 1833.[4] According to an affidavit which was an adjunct to his will he had homes in Amwell Street and Myddleton Square, Clerkenwell, although a syndicated newspaper article reporting that he was living in Camden Town  at the time of his death.

In August 1832 he launched The Penny National Library, an ambitious project (published by Frederic Lawrance at 113 Strand – by December 1832 it had moved to 369 Strand). This initially consisted of six weekly serial educational publications – a grammar and dictionary, a universal biography, an ancient history, a history of England, a law library and a geography and gazetteer, with other similar serial works being added a few weeks later. Other publications soon followed, including The Comic Magazine, edited by “The Editor of Figaro in London” i.e. Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, and, in March 1833, The Critic, a literary and satirical journal.  

However, Thomas soon found himself in financial difficulties, and on 30 October 1833 he was arrested on a unpaid bill of exchange for £159, and was committed to the Fleet Prison. He disputed his arrest, claiming privilege as an attorney, although the person to whom Mayhew owed the money had him arrested on the basis he was trading as a printer and publisher.[5] The following month he entered into partnership with George Frederick Isaacs and Irenaeus Mayhew (his uncle), as printers and publishers, from 369 Strand and 14 Henrietta Street, although steps were already being taken towards his liquidation[6] – the partnership was formally dissolved in March 1834.[7] It was later suggested that Mayhew had lost £10,000.[8]

Thomas Mayhew committed suicide on Thursday 23 October 1834 at his chambers at 2 Barnard’s Inn, Holborn. This fact, and the subsequent inquest, was widely reported in London newspapers. It was initially reported that his body was discovered by his wife and her brother, who were concerned that he hadn’t come home and that he was in straitened financial circumstances, and that they forced open the door to his rooms.[9] This version of events was contradicted during the inquest, which was held on the evening of Saturday 25 October at the Swan and Sugar-Loaf public house, Fetter Lane. This heard that a solicitor, Philip Lawrence, had been approached by Thomas’s wife, concerned about his absence – he went to the chambers, where the porter gave him a package which contained the keys to the chambers, and these were used to gain access.[10]

It was clear from the evidence given that Thomas had swallowed a large quantity of prussic acid, and had also deliberately inhaled the fumes from a piece of burning charcoal. The inquest was told that that as well as his financial problems, Thomas was overwhelmed by work. At the time of his death he was apparently working on a history of England, an encyclopaedia, and a translation of French plays. He was subsequently buried in the churchyard of St. James’s Church, Westminster, on 29 October.

It is hard to believe that in the short period of time between 1832 and 1834 Thomas Mayhew was both working as a solicitor and had his fingers in so many literary projects. Yet there is no doubt that this was the case, as confirmed in the Law Report referred to earlier. It was rare for writer in Bohemian Fleet Street to commit suicide, although several killed themselves in other ways, so this was a measure of just how overwhelming the pressure on Thomas Mayhew was. 

His wife Catharine subsequently moved back to her parents in Somerset, and went on to marry James Thomas, a solicitor, in Lyncombe, on 29 February 1848. She died later that year, and was buried in the cemetery at Bath Abbey on 29 September 1848. His daughter Catharine married Charles Arthur Raynsford in 1864, and they went on to have one daughter born in 1866. They divorced in 1890. She went on to spend a year in Otto House, a private asylum in Hammersmith, between August 1894 and 1895, and she was re-admitted in February 1900 – she died there on 14 March 1900, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, Kensington.

---

[1] See, for example, Morning Post, 25 October 1834, p 4.

[2] See, for example, Morning Post, 31 October 1834, p 3.

[3] See, for example, Morning Advertiser, 27 October 1834, p 1.

[4] London Gazette, 30 August 1833, p 1614.

[5] The Law Journal for the Year 1834, Vol. 3, p 47.

[6] Morning Herald, 4 December 1834, p 7.

[7] London Gazette, 25 April 1834, p 755.

[8] Men of the Time, Kent & Co., 1857, p 522.

[9] See, for example, Morning Post, 25 October 1834, p 4.

[10] See, for example, Morning Post, 31 October 1834, p 3.

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