he said, after a little while, and then he proceeded to read a really pathetic, though not very well-expressed letter from an aggrieved matron, who appealed to him to discontinue or modify the 'Caudle Lectures.' She declared they were bringing discord into families, and making a multitude of women miserable."[1]
In May, 1845, while the "Caudle Lectures" were "sending up Punch's circulation at a rapid rate," their author delivered one of his very few public speeches at the annual conversazione of the Birmingham Polytechnic Institution. As might have been anticipated, one of the speakers touched upon the highly-popular Curtain Lectures, and in the course of his nervously brief reply Douglas Jerrold said:—"Mrs. Caudle! Your honourable member has said he does not believe there is a Mrs. Caudle in all Birmingham. I will even venture to go further than he: I do not think there is a Mrs. Caudle in the whole world. I really think the whole matter is a fiction—a wicked fiction, intended merely to throw into finer contrast the trustingness, the beauty, the confidence, and the taciturnity of the sex."
On August 9, 1845, Mrs. Caudle was drawn upon—on a happy suggestion of Thackeray's—for the purpose of the Punch cartoon, in which Lord Brougham figured as Mrs. Caudle, and Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst as the long-suffering Job. The legend beneath ran as follows: "What do you say? Thank heaven! You're going to enjoy the recess—and you'll be rid of me for some months. Never mind. Depend upon it, when you come back you shall have it again. No; I don't raise the house, and set everybody in it by the ears; but I'm not going to give up every little privilege; though it's seldom I
