When you think about American writers of political and social humor, a few names immediately come to mind: Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, James Thurber.
But there were countless others, well known in their time, but largely forgotten today.
One of them is William Livingston Alden (1837-1908), who was hugely popular in the late 1800s. Last year on this blog, I featured an Alden story regarding one of his favorite topics, cats.
Alden was a prolific writer of both newspaper columns and books. He was to his time what Art Buchwald, Molly Ivins, or Dave Barry are to ours. (I would love to know how those three will be remembered 100-odd years from now — or, indeed, if they are remembered at all.)
One of Alden’s many publications was 1882’s “The Comic Liar,” a compilation of 100-plus articles from his column in the New York Times.
Here are two Alden stories from “The Comic Liar” that are both funny and revealing of the writing style of the time.
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Pockets
A London magistrate lately told a woman whose pocket had been picked, that if women would change the position and plan of their pockets, they would not so frequently suffer from the depredations of light-fingered thieves.
This was a judicial opinion of remarkable acuteness and exceptional value, in so far as it indicated the true reason why women are the favorite prey of pickpockets. Still, it is one thing to point out an evil that deserves to be remedied, and quite another to designate the remedy.
The court which denounced the present female substitute for a pocket did not suggest any practicable improvement upon it, and, indeed, it is doubtful if any man who is not a professional scientific person is fully capable of dealing with so difficult a question.
Man is marsupial, and herein he is broadly distinguished from woman. Nature has provided man with pockets in his trousers, his waistcoat, and his coat. The number is not always the same, some men having, in the aggregate, twelve distinct pockets, great and small, while others have only eight or nine; but a man totally without pockets would be a lusus naturae.
It is remarkable that pockets are not congenital, but are slowly developed during childhood and youth. The trousers-pockets, which are earliest developed, seldom make their appearance before the fifth year, and one of these usually comes to maturity ten or twelve months before its fellow.
About the eighth year a male child develops two and sometimes three coat-pockets, and two years later the lower waistcoat-pockets appear. Nature then pauses in her work, and it is not until the fourteenth year that the small fob-pockets of the waistcoat and the watch-pocket of the trousers are developed.
The appearance of the pistol-pocket and the two coattail-pockets is usually synchronous with the cutting of the wisdom teeth. When these have reached maturity, the normal development of pockets ceases — for the comparatively recent discovery of isolated specimens of men with pockets in the sleeves of their overcoats, apparently designed for stowing away female hands, does not as yet warrant any change in the scientific classification and description of human pockets.
Of the uses of the pocket it is unnecessary to speak, since we are all familiar with them. It may, however, be safely asserted that without pockets men would never have emerged from barbarism.
Hankerchiefs, pen-knives, money, tobacco, latchkeys — those articles the presence of which is essential to civilization, and the absence of which constitutes barbarism — manifestly could not exist in any useful form had not beneficent nature endowed us with pockets.
It is a significant fact that the higher a man rises in the scale of civilization, the more numerous become his pockets. The red man has no pocket whatever; the Turk has two pockets; the people of the south of Europe have rarely more than five, while the man of Anglo-Saxon blood has nine, or — counting those in his overcoat — ten well-defined and practicable pockets.
Representative government, fine-cut tobacco, trial by jury, and revolving pistols are the precious inheritance of the nine-pocketed races. Ignorance, superstition, and a general assortment of miseries are the lot of those who have not developed more than four or five pockets.
Why nature constructed woman without true pockets it does not become us to inquire, although the fact might easily be interpreted as an evidence that women are not designed to become the military or civil leaders of mankind. It is sufficient for us to know that the pocket, in the scientific sense of the term, is the monopoly of the male sex, for it is not yet established that even Dr. Mary Walker has developed a really masculine pocket.
Emulous of the more gifted sex, women have striven to supply the deficiencies of nature by art, and boldly claim that the mysterious and unseen bags which they carry concealed about their persons are virtually pockets.
On this point the distinguished anatomist Cuvier says: “The capacious muslin organ generally called the female pocket has none of the essential characteristics of the true pocket. It is situated a little lower than the placquet, and forms a cul-de-sac, to which the placquet serves as the entrance. It may be removed by the knife without any perceptible effect upon the health, and it is plainly artificial and extraneous.”
The same opinion is held by all educated anatomists, and, though we may admit that the so-called female pocket is capable of containing a large amount of handkerchiefs, candy, hair-pins, and other necessities of feminine existence, its real character as a commonplace bag ought not to be concealed under the pretentious title of pocket.
From the nature of its construction, this bag is so easy of access to the shameless pickpocket that he looks upon it in the light of a storehouse, in which is laid up for his especial benefit portable property of more or less value.
No one will dispute the dictum of the London court, that women who place their purses in these pseudo pockets invite pickpockets to steal them; but what other device can they substitute for the inefficient muslin bag? To require a woman to develop pockets without a basis of trousers, waistcoat, or coat, would be more cruel than was Pharaoh’s request that the Hebrews would make bricks without straw.
Women who desire artificial pockets are limited to the use of the treacherous muslin bag, and the locality in which it is now worn is declared by competent comparative anatomists to be the only one where such an appendage could be securely placed, and remain at the same time easily accessible.
The only way out of the difficulty is for women to abandon the vain effort to emulate marsupial man, and to lay aside their muslin bags. Thus will they remove temptation from the pickpocket, and prove themselves capable of accepting, without a murmur, the mysterious law of nature, which lavishes pockets upon one sex and withholds them inexorably from the other.
Glass Eyes
Of course, there are advantages in having a wife with a glass eye. It confers a certain distinction upon the husband. Wives without glass eyes are exceedingly common, but there is not one man in ten thousand who can proudly mention that he possesses a wife with a glass-eye attachment.
Then, too, the glass-eyed wife has a never-failing resource for quieting a noisy infant. The most vicious baby living — one that habitually bears false witness in regard to the alleged presence of imaginary pins, and who is addicted to an indulgence in midnight colic — could not fail to be instantly soothed into smiles by being permitted to scoop out its mother’s eye.
To the Central African explorer the companionship of a wife with a glass eye would be simply invaluable. He would endear himself to the native husbands by occasionally knocking out his wife’s eye with every apparent sign of marital indignation, and could thus challenge popular admiration as a husband of great intelligence and decision of character without giving the slightest physical pain to his beloved companion.
Employed as a bribe, a glass eye would buy the alliance of every native king on the whole continent; and if Sir Samuel Baker had been equipped with a glass-eyed wife at the time when King Kamrasi admired the bright eyes of Lady Baker, and suggested that he would accept her as a present, the distinguished explorer could have gratified the monarch, and still retained possession of the greater part of his wife, by merely removing her glass eye and presenting it to his majesty.
And yet, in spite of the many apparent advantages which accrue to the husband of a wife with a glass eye, there must be more than compensating disadvantages; for a Rochester man has just begun a suit for divorce on the ground that his wife has a glass eye which inflicts unendurable torments upon him. The chief cause of complaint specified by this unfortunate man is the fact that his wife sleeps with her glass eye wide open.
At first sight this may seem a trivial matter, but a little reflection will lead us to deeply sympathize with the aggrieved husband. It is not pleasant for a man to return home from a political meeting at 2 o’clock in the morning, knowing that however softly he may remove his innumerable boots, or however skillfully he may avoid tumbling over the chairs on which he had deposited his hats, the sleepless glass eye of his wife will gleam, in the light of the two bedroom candles, and follow his wandering movements with a pitiless glare.
The most sober of men cannot awake in the stillness of the night and feel quite at ease when he finds a glass eye watching him as sternly as though the owner knew all about his rash bet on the election, and was waiting to hear him explain how a man who had refused to buy a new parlor carpet could justifiably throw away his money in gambling.
At any rate the Rochester husband found that his nerves were rapidly becoming shattered under the constant nocturnal watching to which he was subjected, and after having tried every possible means to keep his wife’s eye closed, he has now come to lay his woes before an impartial jury.
It can easily be imagined what were the means which he had vainly used to close that vigilant eye. It may not have been positively wrong for him to stealthily cover it with a coat of black paint, but he certainly ought to have known that no sleeping woman can have a paint-brush drawn over half of her face without waking up and expressing decided opinions concerning the act.
It was also natural that, after having found that a copper cent laid on his wife’s eyelid would continually slip from its position, he should have searched for some heavier weight; but it was a mistake to suppose that a large lump of coal would meet the exigencies of the case.
It was, of course, open to him to surreptitiously possess himself of the offending eye and to hide it under the pillow; but after a man has been two or three times suddenly awakened in the morning with the awful question, “What have you done with my eye?” he is reluctant to undergo any further questioning of that sort.
Whether there really is any effective and legitimate method which a tender husband can employ to keep his wife’s glass eye closed at night, is, perhaps, doubtful; but it is very certain that the man who can stealthily try to close his wife’s eye with mucilage has no adequate conception of the holiness of the marriage relation, and cannot be held to come into a divorce court with clean hands.
It is to be hoped in the interest of public morals that the Rochester husband will lose his suit; for if he gains it, our courts will swarm with suitors seeking divorces. If a glass eye is adjudged a sufficient cause for divorce, there would be no reason for refusing to grant a separation to a wife whose husband is guilty of false teeth, or an absolute divorce to a husband whose wife is habitually addicted to a wooden leg.
In spite of the fact that this would illustrate the great doctrine of the survival of the fittest, and would tend to prevent glass eyes and wooden legs from becoming hereditary, it would loosen the marriage tie to an extent which no thoughtful man can contemplate without serious alarm.
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