Nor was it only to the stage that Mrs. Caudle found her way. The "Caudle Duet" was "versified from Punch by B. Nathan; "John Leech made lithograph portraits of the husband and wife; another coloured lithograph represented "Mrs. Caudle's Changeable Faces;" while penny portraits of Margaret and Job Caudle were hawked about the streets. All this in 1845, but even in 1860 yet another brochure appeared, "Mrs. Caudle in Crinoline," with coloured plates.
In 1847, Charles Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, and their fellow "splendid strollers" played at Manchester and Liverpool to raise a fund for a charitable purpose, and Dickens afterwards designed a small work to be sold for the benefit of the same fund. In this work, Mrs. Gamp was to be supposed to have accompanied the players and to have written her account of them and their goings on. The project fell through after Dickens had written but a part of the small skit, but that part is given in Forster's biography of the novelist, and from it I will extract the bit which concerns the history of Mrs. Caudle. Mrs. Gamp is supposed to have come across the strollers on a railway platform:—
"I was a-wondering wot Mr. Wilson meant, wen he says, 'There's Dougladge, Mrs. Gamp!' he says. 'There's him as wrote the life of Mrs. Caudle!'
"Mrs. Harris, wen I see that little willain bodily before me, it give me such a turn that I was all in a tremble. If I hadn't lost my umbereller in the cab, I must have done him an injury with it! Oh the bragian little traitor! right among the ladies, Mrs. Harris; looking his wickedest and deceitfullest of eyes while he was a-talking to 'em; laughing at his own jokes as loud as you please; holding his hat in one
