Читать книгу The Essays of Douglas Jerrold онлайн

7 страница из 68

If the first few essays testify to the author’s loving homage to Shakespeare, others in no uncertain voice proclaim his political radicalism, his detestation of war, and his sense of the truth that man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn. In Recollections of Guy Fawkes the references to the Isle of Sheppy “some five and twenty years ago” are reminiscences of Jerrold’s boyhood at Sheerness. The pleasant little homily on human consistency, The Manager’s Pig, is said to have been founded in fact; the manager in question being Davidge of the Coburg Theatre, to whom Jerrold was for a time “household author” at a weekly salary. The series of Cat-and-Fiddle Moralities so auspiciously begun with The Tale of a Tiger was not pursued any further. The Drill Sergeant and The Greenwich Pensioner formed part of a series of Full Lengths, contributed to the Monthly Magazine in 1826-7; there were at least six of them, but as I have not been able to consult a complete set of the magazine, I have only been able to trace three—the two given and one on The Ship Clergyman.