VICTORIAN MORALS
her
philoprogenitiveness was not sacred. The combined respect and
irony in their attitude toward the Queen can be seen in the account
of the "patterers," who hawked literature in the streets. They never,
they told Mayhew, had much to say about the Queen: "... it
wouldn't go down.... In coorse nothing can be said against her, and
nothing ought to, that's true enough." Yet one patterer, as it turned
out, had hawked "news" about the Queen during her most recent
confinement:
I cried her
accouchement
[pronounced as in English without knowledge
of French] of
three!
Lord love you, sir, it would have been no use crying
one;
peoples so used to that; but a Bobby carne up and he stops me, and
said it was some impudence about the Queen's
coachman!
Why look at
it,
says I, fat-head- I knew I was safe....
And the royal love affair seemed to have afforded them infinite
amusement. One street ballad, for example, had one quatrain:
Here I am in rags
From the land of AU-dirt
To marry England's Queen
And my name is Prince Albert.
other eminent people they were liable to have more reserved
lJilL1VU".
The hero of Waterloo was not much amiss,
"if
he lets poli–
alone," but the name of a bishop was for them but another name
Beelzebub. The aristocrats in general they regarded as tricksters
somehow got something for nothing, although they were com–
nonplussed, literally, by the concept of living without working.
for the middle class, the patterers freely and cynically exploited
prejudices, especially the anti-Roman one. One experienced pat–
told Mayhew that although they peddled anti-Papal literature
religious crises, as in the affair of Cardinal Wiseman, they
no feeling about the Pope one way or another:
"We
goes to it
at an election." His own favorite, the man said, was a ballad called
Pope and Cardinal Wiseman" whose chorus ran thus:
Monks and Nuns and fools afloat,
We'll ha.ve no bulls shoved down our throat,
Cheer up and shout down with the Pope,
And his bishop Cardinal Wiseman.
