Quick Review

The Life and Remains of Douglas Jerrold by Blanchard Jerrold

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Yet another reprint for me on the Espresso Book Machine.  This one because Jerrold's name comes up still, now and then, in histories of the early 19th, and or in anthologies of wit.  Douglas Jerrold was a very clever, rather black-humoured little man; quite famous in his day as a playwright, and author particularly of the once hugely successful "Black-Eyed Susan," a nautical comedy later parodied in Gilbert & Sullivan's HMS Pinafore.  If he is now remembered at all, it would be as a man of Punch, to which he contributed much in poetry, prose and journalism.  It was in this last that I had most recently encountered him, in an anthology of essays, wherein I found a scathing indictment of a French colonial campaign against a native Arab population, ending in the putting to death by fire of over 500 men, women and children in the Caves at Dahra, in 1845. A brilliant piece of invective!  I'd first met with Jerrold in a collection of his anecdotes and witty sayings, along with those of Charles Lamb for some reason as the gentlemen did not really know one another.  That curious little collection was edited by Douglas Jerrold's son, Blanchard, the author of this biography.

And a pretty good job of it he made, the son.  Jerrold senior's life was not atypical of the period; with a poor, but clever boy finding enough patronage just to live until talent and hard work at last provided him with some small measure of a living, eventually crowned by a triumph or two.  The son, like his father, exhibits here both a real wit and a ready charm, both likewise tinged with a dark fatalism.  Unlike his illustrious father though, Blanchard Jerrold is much more the Victorian Gentleman than the Enlightenment cynic.  The unfortunate result?  About the middle of the book, when Douglas Jerrold begins the happiest part of his career, moving from success to success, the son can not resist retelling each, in detail.  Oh dear.  The resulting professional hagiography might yet hold some interest, had any of the work described survived down to our day.  Sadly, neither Jerrold's plays nor much else will now be familiar to any but specialists in the period, if then.  In an otherwise entertaining and thoughtful biography, this then makes for a long and deadly stretch of unfamiliar names, forgotten players, lost occasions and little interest.  (For a man who died relatively young, even for the time, and what's more a man always of delicate health, Douglas Jerrold was a busy, busy little man.  Sad, really, to think how little of all that survives him.)

When at last his father's health began to fail and his last, most rhetorically interesting editorializing was undertaken, the son's biography, ironically picks back up and in the end, proves a good and moving tribute to a fascinating and complicated figure.

I only wish some collection of Jerrold's plays and or his journalism and occasional writing had been available as a proper course of parallel reading, but alas, this was not to be.  still, I don't regret the time spent with both father and son, and I will look out hereafter for more of the Jerrolds.



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