Every night, Mr Caudle is settling down to sleep when his wife begins to talk. Mrs Caudle has opinions about his friends, his habits, his money, his holidays and his failure to understand her. She delivers them in the darkness of the marital bed, under the bedclothes, with relentless vigour, and he, poor man, has no choice but to lie there and listen.
Douglas Jerrold’s comic series first appeared in the magazine Punch and was an immediate hit with Victorian readers. Each lecture is a miniature monologue, a comic sketch of marriage as seen from the pillow. In thirty-eight short sections and a little over four hours, this recording gathers the whole sequence, an entertaining dip into the humour of the 1840s, with a surprising number of jokes that still land today.
Introduction
Douglas William Jerrold (1803–1857) was the son of an actor-manager. After some time in the Navy and as an apprentice printer, he became a playwright and then a journalist. He was a contemporary and friend of Charles Dickens, and he was one of the writers who gave Punch magazine its early reputation for lively and sometimes radical comic writing. Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures first appeared in Punch in 1845, and they were published in book form in 1846.
Each lecture is a complaint delivered at bedtime by Mrs Caudle to her patient husband. The comedy depends on the form: we never hear from Mr Caudle, and it is the wife who has the whole stage. Jerrold gives her a distinctive voice, a mixture of grievance, shrewd observation and unstoppable logic. The sketches touch on money, social ambition, family quarrels, neighbours and the comic misunderstandings of daily life. Readers in the nineteenth century enjoyed them, and a modern audience may notice that the humour reflects the attitudes of its time, including some stereotypes of women and marriage that are less comfortable now.
The recording presents 38 lectures and runs for about four and a half hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer.
Why listen today? The short, self-contained sections make it ideal for listening in small doses, and the book offers a picture of everyday Victorian domestic life that is quite different from the grand novels of the period. It is also a good example of the comic monologue, a form that is still alive in stand-up and on the stage.
Public domain
Douglas William Jerrold died in 1857: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
