ABSTRACT
The Man in the Moon had been established in January 1847, as a rival to Punch; its editors were Angus B. Reach and (until March 1847) Albert Smith, and its contributors included G. A. Sala and Shirley Brooks. Apart from Punch and Dickens, its recurrent victims included Jerrold, Forster and his Examiner, Carlyle, and Howitt (see, e.g., v, 111, 177, 242). The attacks on Dombey and Son were kept up: ‘LOST—Somewhere between the stage door of the St James’s Theatre and Miss Burdett Coutts’s Ragged Schools, the plot of the story of Dombey and Son. No use to any body but the owner, and not much to him’ (January 1848, iii, 8). Or, in a cod-almanac—‘Read Vanity Fair, but avoid comparing it with Dombey and Son, or you will never be able to bear the latter again’ (ibid, 14). In February 1848 there was a lampoon, ‘Dombey and Son Finished. Part the Best and Last’ (iii, 59–67). Another cod ‘Trial’ appeared in January 1849: ‘Mr Charles Dickens was placed at the bar, charged with having extorted divers sums of five shillings each for a work [The Haunted Man], which, on perusal was found to be entirely unintelligible…’ (v, 50–2). See Mary Edminson, ‘Charles Dickens and The Man in the Moon’, Dickensian, lvi (1960), 50–9, which reprints ‘Dombey and Son Finished’. After this lampoon, which made much of Carker’s flashing teeth, ‘Carker never dared show his teeth’ again, according to Harrison Ainsworth (S. M. Ellis, William Harrison Ainsworth and his Friends (1911), i, 166). As Miss Edminson comments, ‘This is not, in fact, strictly accurate, but it indicates the opinion of another author on the strength of the satire’ (loc. cit., 51).
