Atlantic Monthly | Page 3

all our
blood is liable, and tried a bout of naval life. At eleven years of age he
became a middy, and served a short time--not two years in all--in a
vessel stationed in the North Sea. Naval life was a rough affair in those
days. Jerrold's most remarkable experience seems to have been
bringing over the wounded of Waterloo from Belgium; which stamped
on his mind a sense of the horrors of war that never left him, but is
marked on his writings everywhere, in spite of a certain combative turn
and an admiration of heroes which also belonged to him. To the last, he
had an interest in sea matters, and spoke with enthusiasm of Lord
Nelson. But the literary use he made of his nautical experience ended
with "Black-eyed Susan." He was a boy when he came ashore and
threw himself on the very different sea of London; and it is the
influence of London that is most perceptible in his mature works. Here
his work was done, his battles fought, his mind formed; and you may
observe in his writings a certain romantic and ideal way of speaking of
the country, which shows that to him it was a place of retreat and

luxury, rather than of sober, practical living. This is not uncommon
with literary men whose lot has been cast in a great city, if they possess,
as Jerrold did, that poetic temperament which is alive to natural beauty.
He now became an apprentice in a printing-office, and went through
the ordinary course of a printer's life. He felt genius stirring in him, and
he strove for the knowledge to give it nourishment, and the field to give
it exercise. He read and wrote, as well as worked and talked. It would
be a task for antiquarian research to recover his very earliest
lucubrations scattered among the ephemeral periodicals of that day.
Plays of his might be dug out, whose very names are unknown to his
most intimate friends. He scattered his early fruit far and wide,--getting
little from the world in exchange. Literature was then a harder struggle
than in our days. Jerrold did not know the successful men who presided
over it. He had no patrons; and he had few friends. The isolation and
poverty in which he formed his mind and style deepened the peculiarity
which was a characteristic of these. They gave to his genius that intense
and eccentric character which it has; and no doubt (for Fortune has a
way of compensating) the chill they breathed on the fruits of his young
nature enriched their ripeness, as a touch of frost does with plums. The
grapes from which Tokay is made are left hanging even when the snow
is on them;--all the better for Tokay!
His youth, then, was a long and hard struggle to get bread in exchange
for wit;--a struggle like that of the poor girls who sell violets in the
streets. He was wont to talk of those early days very
freely,--passionately, even to tears, when he got excited,--and always
bravely, heartily, and with the right "moral" to follow. When Diderot
had passed a whole day without bread, he vowed that if he ever got
prosperous, he would save any fellow-creature that he could from such
suffering. Jerrold had learned the same lesson. Through life, he took the
side of the poor and weak. It was the secret, at once, of his philosophy
and his politics. He got endless abuse for his eternal tirades against the
great and the "respectable,"--against big-wigs of every size and shape.
But the critics who attacked him for this negative pole of his
intellectual character overlooked the positive one. He had kindness and
sympathy enough; but he always gave them first to those who wanted
them most. And as humorist and satirist he had a natural tendency to
attack power,--to play Pasquin against the world's Pope. In fact, his

radicalism was that of a humorist. He never adopted the utilitarian, or,
as it was called, "philosophical," radicalism which was so fashionable
in his younger days;--not, indeed, the Continental radicalism held by a
party in England;--but was an independent kind of warrior, fighting
under his own banner, and always rather with the weapons of a man of
letters than those of a politician. For the business aspect of politics he
never showed any predilection from first to last.
Well, then,--picture him to yourself, reader, a small, delicate youth,
with fair, prominent features,--long, thin hair,--keen, eager, large, blue
eyes, glancing out from right to left, as he walks the streets of
Babylon,--and seizing with a quick impulsiveness every feeling of the
hour. Still young,--and very young,--he has married for love. He is
living in a cottage or villakin on the outskirts of town, where there