Mrs Caudles Curtain Lectures

Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures,
by D. Jerrold

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Title: Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures
Author: Douglas Jerrold

Release Date: July, 2004 [EBook #6054] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on October 28, 2002]
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, MRS.
CAUDLE'S CURTAIN LECTURES ***

Transcribed from the 1902 R. Brimley Johnson edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

MRS. CAUDLE'S CURTAIN LECTURES BY DOUGLAS JERROLD

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

It has happened to the writer that two, or three, or ten, or twenty
gentlewomen have asked him--and asked in various notes of wonder,
pity, and reproof -
"What could have made you think of Mrs. Caudle?
"How could such a thing have entered any man's mind?"
There are subjects that seem like rain drops to fall upon a man's head,
the head itself having nothing to do with the matter. The result of no
train of thought, there is the picture, the statue, the book, wafted, like
the smallest seed, into the brain to feed upon the soil, such as it may be,
and grow there. And this was, no doubt, the accidental cause of the
literary sowing and expansion--unfolding like a night-flower--of MRS.

CAUDLE.
But let a jury of gentlewomen decide.
It was a thick, black wintry afternoon, when the writer stopt in the front
of the playground of a suburban school. The ground swarmed with
boys full of the Saturday's holiday. The earth seemed roofed with the
oldest lead, and the wind came, sharp as Shylock's knife, from the
Minories. But those happy boys ran and jumped, and hopped, and
shouted, and--unconscious men in miniature!--in their own world of
frolic, had no thought of the full-length men they would some day
become; drawn out into grave citizenship; formal, respectable,
responsible. To them the sky was of any or all colours; and for that
keen east wind--if it was called the east wind--cutting the shoulder-
blades of old, old men of forty {1}--they in their immortality of
boyhood had the redder faces, and the nimbler blood for it.
And the writer, looking dreamily into that playground, still mused on
the robust jollity of those little fellows, to whom the tax-gatherer was
as yet a rarer animal than baby hippopotamus. Heroic boyhood, so
ignorant of the future in the knowing enjoyment of the present! And the
writer still dreaming and musing, and still following no distinct line of
thought, there struck upon him, like notes of sudden household music,
these words--CURTAIN LECTURES.
One moment there was no living object save those racing, shouting
boys; and the next, as though a white dove had alighted on the pen
hand of the writer, there was--MRS. CAUDLE.
Ladies of the jury, are there not then some subjects of letters that
mysteriously assert an effect without any discoverable cause?
Otherwise, wherefore should the thought of CURTAIN LECTURES
grow from a school ground--wherefore, among a crowd of holiday
school-boys, should appear MRS. CAUDLE?
For the LECTURES themselves, it is feared they must be given up as a
farcical desecration of a solemn time-honoured privilege; it may be,
exercised once in a life time,--and that once having the effect of a

hundred repetitions, as Job lectured his wife. And Job's wife, a certain
Mohammedan writer delivers, having committed a fault in her love to
her husband, he swore that on his recovery he would deal her a hundred
stripes. Job got well, and his heart was touched and taught by the
tenderness to keep his vow, and still to chastise his help-mate; for he
smote her once with a palm-branch having a hundred leaves.
DOUGLAS JERROLD.

INTRODUCTION

Poor Job Caudle was one of the few men whom Nature, in her casual
bounty to women, sends into the