Humour In Victorian Psyche

The classroom has always been embedded in the Victorian psyche, providing nostalgia to men reminiscing about their schoolboy antics. This often included crude jokes (of taunts and name-calling) and pranks played on each other. Therefore, the laughter created in Tenniel’s cartoon is this nostalgia of one’s school days. The style that Disraeli and Gladstone attack each other with are evidently reminiscent of such school days. Rodnesky depicts schoolboy humour as a “conversational humour [with] sexual and scatological jokes, and frequent allusions to the classics” (418-419). In light of “A Bad Example”, the conversational humour (the idea of irony, puns, allusions) here is their “weapon of political rhetoric” (Meisel, 282). This is shown through both men’s splodge of mud only on their noses and hands, in which Tenniel may portrayal their feud as nothing more than folly. This folly can be shown through Disraeli’s most infamous verbal assault on Gladstone in early 1878 after Gladstone attacking his Jewish ancestry. He

This relays the previous idea of play but also taunting. Gladstone’s mud is firm in his hand and curled up ready to attack despite Disraeli’s flimsy wrists. This image can tell us about Gladstone’s rivalry towards Disraeli too. During the third day (out of five) debate on Britain preparing for war with Russia, Gladstone travelled to Disraeli to unleash (a perhaps better) attack on his character than Disraeli’s “exuberance” remark. He taunted Disraeli alluding to his government as like Duke Wellington’s ‘one and a nought’ (Aldous, 281), where the insult is the cabinet’s opposition towards such policies on the Eastern Question. These examples then reinforce the type of conversational humour (of taunts and name-calling) both men used towards each