their weekly appearance. The account is given by Ebenezer Landells, so closely identified with the beginnings of Punch. "One evening at the Punch Club there had been more than the usual amount of chaff going on between Henry Baylis and Douglas Jerrold, when the former suddenly said, 'If you will give me a pen and ink I will make a prophecy that shall be fulfilled within two years. It shall be sealed up and given to Daddy Longlegs [myself] upon his undertaking not to open it before the expiration of that time.' The paper was handed to me, and carefully put by. Time passed, and I had forgotten the circumstance altogether, when some years afterwards, looking over some old pocket-books, I found a sealed letter addressed to 'Daddy Longlegs, Esq.—to be opened two years after date.' On breaking the seal I found the following: 'I, Henry Baylis, do hereby prophesy that within two years from this date, Douglas Jerrold will write something that shall be as popular as anything that Charles Dickens ever wrote.'" Within those two years, as Mr. Spielmann[1] points out, the "Caudle Lectures" had been produced, and Baylis's prophecy fulfilled.
The first page of the first number of the eighth volume of Punch, the number dated January 4, 1845, contained the opening passages of the "Introduction" to "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures," and in the next number was given the first lecture. Henceforward they appeared with occasional intermissions up to November 8, when the thirty-sixth and "last" was printed with Doyle's pathetic little black-bordered "cut" of a weeping cupid extinguishing a candle. The success of the lectures was instant and sustained, although Punch's rival publications
- ↑ "The History of Punch," by M. H. Spielmann, p. 97.
