of literature.
Therefore we must take something of the vulgarity of Jerrold as a
circumstance of the social ranks wherein he delighted. But the essential
vulgarity is that of the woman. There is in some old _Punch_ volume a
drawing by Leech--whom one is weary of hearing named the gentle, the
refined--where the work of the artist has vied with the spirit of the
letter-press. Douglas Jerrold treats of the woman's jealousy, Leech of
her stays. They lie on a chair by the bed, beyond description gross. And
page by page the woman is derided, with an unfailing enjoyment of her
foolish ugliness of person, of manners, and of language. In that time
there was, moreover, one great humourist; he bore his part willingly in
vulgarising the woman; and the part that fell to him was the vulgarising
of the act of maternity. Woman spiteful, woman suing man at the law for
evading her fatuous companionship, woman incoherent, woman abandoned
without restraint to violence and temper, woman feigning sensibility--in
none of these ignominies is woman so common, foul, and foolish for
Dickens as she is in child-bearing.

I named Leech but now. He was, in all things essential, Dickens's
contemporary. And accordingly the married woman and her child are
humiliated by his pencil; not grossly, but commonly. For him she is
moderately and dully ridiculous. What delights him as humorous is that
her husband--himself wearisome enough to die of--is weary of her, finds
the time long, and tries to escape her. It amuses him that she should
furtively spend money over her own dowdiness, to the annoyance of her
husband, and that her husband should have no desire to adorn her, and
that her mother should be intolerable. It pleases him that her baby,
with enormous cheeks and a hideous rosette in its hat--a burlesque
baby--should be a grotesque object of her love, for that too makes subtly
for her abasement. Charles Keene, again--another contemporary, though he
lived into a later and different time. He saw little else than common
forms of human ignominy--indignities of civic physique, of stupid
prosperity, of dress, of bearing. He transmits these things in greater
proportion than he found them--whether for love of the humour of them, or
by a kind of inverted disgust that is as eager as delight--one is not
sure which is the impulse. The grossness of the vulgarities is rendered
with a completeness that goes far to convince us of a certain
sensitiveness o