Pantomime and the Experienced Young Fellow

Abstract

The starting point for this chapter is a cartoon from Punch, 25 February 1860 (Figure 5.1). The caption reads ‘EXPERIENCED YOUNG FELLOW: Ah, Clara, you should have seen the Pantomines [sic] that I’ve seen; these modern affairs ain’t half so good.’ It shows middle-class children alone in a drawing-room, the little girl slumped in a chair in an attitude she would certainly not have been allowed if adults were present; her brother stands and pontificates to her, in parody of his elders. In July of the same year the artist who drew this apparently produced another cartoon showing two little boys leaning on a grand piano, in which cousin Jack, in an Eton suit, asks cousin Henry, in a pinafore, if he likes grammar, and gets the reply that Henry doesn’t know because he’s never tasted it. Both drawings rely on fond observation of childish experiments in status play, their jockeying for power through the assertion of greater experience. In the February cartoon the game is observed to begin when the players are even further down the hierarchy: the experienced young fellow is himself still in skirts, and can only assert his superiority to a little girl. He cannot even pronounce ‘pantomime’ properly. But an important part of this joke is that the child has picked up the central adult attitude to the subject about which he is instructing his sister. The observation that pantomime ‘ain’t half so good’ as it used to be has accompanied it down the ages, from its arrival in Britain to today.